The Sickness Unto Death

THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH

KIERKEGAARD’S WRITINGS, XIX

THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH

A CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPOSITION FOR UPBUILDING AND AWAKENING

by Søren Kierkegaard

Edited and Translated
with Introduction and Notes by

Howard V. Hong and
Edna H. Hong

Copyright © 1980 by Howard V. Hong
Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 0-691-07247-7
ISBN 0-691-02028-0 pbk.

Editorial preparation of this work has been assisted by a
grant from Lutheran Brotherhood, a fraternal benefit society,
with headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper
and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
Committee on Production Guidelines for book Longevity of the
Council on Library Resources

Designed by Frank Mahood

Printed in the United States of America

First Princeton Paperback printing, with corrections, 1983

               15  16  17  18  19  20

http://pup.princeton.edu

ISBN-13: 978-0-691-02028-0 (pbk.)

CONTENTS

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

The Sickness unto Death

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

Part One
THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH IS DESPAIR

A
Despair is the Sickness unto Death

A. DESPAIR IS A SICKNESS OF THE SPIRIT, OF THE SELF, AND ACCORDINGLY CAN TAKE THREE FORMS: IN DESPAIR NOT TO BE CONSCIOUS OF HAVING A SELF; IN DESPAIR NOT TO WILL TO BE ONESELF; IN DESPAIR TO WILL TO BE ONESELF

B. THE POSSIBILITY AND THE ACTUALITY OF DESPAIR

C. DESPAIR IS “THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH”

B
The Universality of This Sickness (Despair)

C
The Forms of This Sickness (Despair)

A. DESPAIR CONSIDERED WITHOUT REGARD TO ITS BEING CONSCIOUS OR NOT, CONSEQUENTLY ONLY WITH REGARD TO THE CONSTITUENTS OF THE SYNTHESIS

a. Despair as Defined by Finitude/Infinitude

α. Infinitude’s Despair Is to Lack Finitude

β. Finitude’s Despair Is to Lack Infinitude

b. Despair as Defined by Possibility/Necessity

α. Possibility’s Despair Is to Lack Necessity

β. Necessity’s Despair Is to Lack Possibility

B. DESPAIR AS DEFINED BY CONSCIOUSNESS

a. The Despair That Is Ignorant of Being Despair, or the Despairing Ignorance of Having a Self and an Eternal Self

b. The Despair That Is Conscious of Being Despair and Therefore Is Conscious of Having a Self in Which There Is Something Eternal and Then either in Despair Does Not Will to Be Itself or in Despair Wills to Be Itself

α. In Despair Not to Will to Be Oneself: Despair in Weakness

(1) DESPAIR OVER THE EARTHLY OR OVER SOMETHING EARTHLY

(2) DESPAIR OF THE ETERNAL OR OVER ONESELF

β. In Despair to Will to Be Oneself: Defiance

Part Two
DESPAIR IS SIN

A
Despair Is Sin

CHAPTER 1. THE GRADATIONS IN THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE SELF (THE QUALIFICATION: “BEFORE GOD”)

Appendix. That the Definition of Sin Includes the Possibility of Offense, a General Observation about Offense

CHAPTER 2. THE SOCRATIC DEFINITION OF SIN

CHAPTER 3. SIN IS NOT A NEGATION BUT A POSITION

Appendix to A
But then in a Certain Sense Does Not Sin Become a Great Rarity? (The Moral)

B
The Continuance of Sin

A. THE SIN OF DESPAIRING OVER ONE’S SIN

B. THE SIN OF DESPAIRING OF THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS (OFFENSE)

C. THE SIN OF DISMISSING CHRISTIANITY modo ponendo [POSITIVELY], OF DECLARING IT TO BE UNTRUTH

SUPPLEMENT

Key to References

Original Title Page

Selected Entries from Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers Pertaining to The Sickness unto Death

EDITORIAL APPENDIX

Acknowledgments

Collation of The Sickness unto Death in the Danish Editions of Kierkegaard’s Collected Works

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

INDEX

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

Early in 1849, a few months before the publication of The Sickness unto Death (July 30, 1849), Kierkegaard gave his own estimate that the pseudonymous works by Anti-Climacus (The Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity) are “extremely valuable.”1

The writing of The Sickness unto Death was done in an amazingly short time, mainly during the period March–May 1848. The variations between the final draft and the provisional draft and between the printing manuscript and the final draft are very few, although some changes were of great importance to Kierkegaard himself.

The speed of the writing and the facility with which the manuscript took final form are owing no doubt to Kierkegaard’s longstanding concern with the nature and meaning of anxiety and despair in relation to the becoming of the self, questions that were occupying him even more than a decade before the writing of The Sickness unto Death. In the Gilleleje letter of 1835 (when Kierkegaard was twenty-two years old), he wrote that a person must “first learn to know himself before learning anything else (γνωθι σεαυτον).”2 In 1836 he wrote that “the present age is the age of despair.”3 Despair and forgiveness are the theme of a journal entry from 1837,4 as is also the case in some entries from 1838, one of which includes a reference to Lazarus and the sickness unto death.5 In the preface to his first book, From the Papers of One Still Living, Kierkegaard makes a distinction between what he later calls the “first” and the “deeper self,”6 and, in his criticism of the substance of Hans Christian Andersen’s Only a Fiddler as inchoate estheticism dependent upon external conditions, he invokes the category of despair without, however, employing the term. Reading what medieval thinkers said about aridity and melancholy (acedia and tristitia) prompted recollection of “what my father called: A quiet despair.”7 Shortly thereafter (July 5, 1840), in considering Kant’s and Hegel’s emphasis upon mind and theory of knowledge, he made reference to “genuine anthropological contemplation, which has not yet been undertaken.”8 Kierkegaard’s entire authorship may in a sense be regarded as the result of his having undertaken that task, and The Sickness unto Death is the consummation of his “anthropological contemplation,” with despair as a central clue to his anthropology.

All the above-mentioned strains of thought are crystallized in a few lines of a student sermon given on January 12, 1841—lines that could serve as part of the table of contents of The Sickness unto Death:

Or was there not a time also in your consciousness, my listener, when cheerfully and without a care you were glad with the glad, when you wept with those who wept, when the thought of God blended irrelevantly with your other conceptions, blended with your happiness but did not sanctify it, blended with your grief but did not comfort it? And later was there not a time when this in some sense guiltless life, which never called itself to account, vanished? Did there not come a time when your mind was unfruitful and sterile, your will incapable of all good, your emotions cold and weak, when hope was dead in your breast, and recollection painfully clutched at a few solitary memories of happiness and soon these also became loathsome, when everything was of no consequence to you, and the secular bases of comfort found their way to your soul only to wound even more your troubled mind, which impatiently and bitterly turned away from them? Was there not a time when you found no one to whom you could turn, when the darkness of quiet despair brooded over your soul, and you did not have the courage to let it go but would rather hang onto it and you even brooded once more over your despair? When heaven was shut for you, and the prayer died on your lips, or it became a shriek of anxiety that demanded an accounting from heaven, and yet you sometimes found within you a longing, an intimation to which you might ascribe meaning, but this was soon crushed by the thought that you were a nothing and your soul lost in infinite space? Was there not a time when you felt that the world did not understand your grief, could not heal it, could not give you any peace, that this had to be in heaven, if heaven was anywhere to be found; alas, it seemed to you that the distance between heaven and earth was infinite, and just as you yourself lost yourself in contemplating the immeasurable world, just so God had forgotten you and did not care about you? And in spite of all this, was there not a defiance in you that forbade you to humble yourself under God’s mighty hand? Was this not so? And what would you call this condition if you did not call it death, and how would you describe it except as darkness? But then when hope....9

If these lines may be regarded as an epitomization of Kierkegaard’s anthropological contemplation to that date, The Concept of Anxiety (June 17, 1844), by Vigilius Haufniensis, and The Sickness unto Death may be regarded as a two-stage explication. Both are based on the concept of man as a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal.