The Sickness unto Death

Introduction (Translator’s Introduction by Alastair Hannay)

The sickness ‘unto death’ Kierkegaard describes is not physical death but despair—the resistance to Christian faith and the self’s failure to ground itself in God—and the Introduction situates this claim within Kierkegaard’s philosophy of selfhood, his biography, and his pseudonymous authorship strategy.

• The ‘sickness unto death’ is not fatal physical illness but despair: the refusal to accept Christian faith, which for Kierkegaard constitutes a spiritual disorder because it involves the self’s ongoing failure to become what it essentially is.
  • In the New Testament story, Jesus raising Lazarus shows that for the Christian, death is not the ultimate end; the true sickness is resistance to this belief—accepting that death is final.
  • Unlike ordinary illness, despair is maintained by the sufferer’s own continual choice; one is responsible for ‘catching’ it and for its persistence, since at every moment of despair one brings it upon oneself.
• Despair is paradoxically desirable as a stage of spiritual development, because it is the only avenue toward truth and salvation—to be cured one must first pass through despair rather than avoid it.
  • The possibility of despair is ‘man’s advantage over the beast’ and the Christian’s advantage over the natural man; spiritual fulfilment requires that despair be actively countered and rendered impotent.
  • The cure—the self grounding itself transparently in the power that established it—requires full self-awareness, which is itself the goal of spiritual development, so the cure is not available until one reaches the crisis point.
• Kierkegaard’s concept of the self is extraordinarily demanding: selfhood is constituted in consciousness, and its highest degree requires standing ‘before God,’ meaning that the more one grasps the conception of God, the more fully a self one becomes.
  • The self is not a fixed substance but a relation that relates to itself; degrees of selfhood correspond to degrees of self-consciousness, and the highest degree involves the conception of God.
  • This requirement is linked to the nineteenth-century atomization of society: as industrialization dissolved organic social identities, individuals were extruded into a naked particularity that, for Kierkegaard, is precisely the position suited to standing directly before God.
• The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. is bound to be noticed.
• Despair takes two main forms—not wanting to be oneself (weakness) and wanting to be oneself (defiance)—but both reduce to the same root: refusing to accept the divinely established ideal of the self modeled on Christ.
  • The despair of ‘wanting to be oneself’ is wanting to be one’s own self rather than a self whose identity is the outcome of a relationship to God; it is wanting to manufacture one’s own identity.
  • Someone who manufactures their own identity lacks ‘something eternally firm’; such a self is ‘a king without a country’ in which rebellion is legitimate at every moment.
• The despairer cannot die—cannot be rid of the self—and this inability to extinguish the eternal in oneself is the precise torment that makes despair a sickness ‘unto death’: it is eternally dying without dying.
  • The torment of despair is precisely not being able to die; despair tries to consume the self but cannot, because the self is grounded in the eternal which cannot be extinguished.
  • Sartre’s ‘useless passion’ (man’s desire to be God) is structurally parallel but inverted: for Anti-Climacus, what is useless is not the drive toward God but the attempt to extinguish it.
• The book is pseudonymously authored by Anti-Climacus, a figure Kierkegaard places above himself spiritually, allowing the work to present an idealized Christian standpoint that Kierkegaard acknowledges he himself falls short of.
  • “J. Climacus places himself so low he admits to not being a Christian; Anti-Climacus gives the impression of taking himself to be a Christian to an extraordinary degree—Kierkegaard places himself between the two.” —Søren Kierkegaard
  • The absence of a genuinely nihilistic alternative in the work—where rejecting Christianity is itself classified as sin—follows from this committed standpoint: the framework of Christian belief is the presumptive starting point.
• The philosophical vocabulary of the book—synthesis of infinite/finite, eternal/temporal, possibility/necessity—functions as a structural table of contents describing the various imbalances that constitute the forms of despair.
  • The self is described as a ‘relation which relates to itself,’ not a thing; this self-relating relation is what Kierkegaard calls spirit, and its imbalance is despair.
  • The eternal/temporal polarity frames the process of growing self-awareness: to become aware of the self is to become aware of something eternal in it, which transcends yet is rooted in temporal existence.

Introduction (Kierkegaard’s own Introduction to the work)

Kierkegaard opens by establishing that for the Christian, physical death—including the death of Lazarus—is not the ultimate sickness unto death, because Christ as ’the resurrection and the life’ transforms death into a passage; therefore the true sickness unto death must be something other than physical dying, something only the Christian is equipped to recognize as truly horrifying.

• For the Christian, no earthly suffering—including death itself—constitutes the true sickness unto death, because Christ’s existence as ’the resurrection and the life’ means death is merely a minor event within eternal life.
  • Even if Christ had not raised Lazarus, the mere existence of Christ as resurrection and life means Lazarus’s sickness was not unto death; physical death ends nothing for the believer.
  • Christianity teaches the Christian to regard death and all worldly misery—want, illness, torment, grief—with a ‘high-mindedness’ that treats them as jokes compared to the true horror Christianity has discovered.
• The Christian acquires courage against lesser dangers precisely by learning to fear something infinitely more horrifying—the sickness unto death that only Christianity identifies—just as one faces a lesser danger fearlessly when a greater danger is present.
  • The natural man does not know what is truly horrifying and so shrinks from things that are not; the Christian, like an adult compared to a child, knows the real object of dread.
  • This is analogous to the pagan’s relationship to God: the pagan does not know the true God and worships an idol instead, just as the natural man fears the wrong things.

Part One: The Sickness unto Death is Despair

That Despair is the Sickness unto Death

Despair is defined as the sickness of the spirit or self—a structural imbalance in the self’s relation to itself and to the power that established it—and its torment consists precisely in the inability to die, since the eternal dimension of the self cannot be consumed or extinguished.

• The human being is spirit, the self is a relation that relates to itself, and despair arises when this self-relating synthesis of infinite/finite, eternal/temporal, and freedom/necessity is in imbalance and fails to ground itself in the power that established it.
  • “The self is not a substance but a derived relation: ‘The self is a relation which relates to itself, or that in the relation which is its relating to itself.’” —Anti-Climacus
  • Because the self is established by something else (God), any attempt to resolve despair purely from within itself only works the self deeper into despair; equilibrium requires relating to that establishing power.
• The possibility of despair is man’s advantage over animals and the Christian’s advantage over the natural man, but actually being in despair is the greatest misfortune—an inversion of the usual relationship between possibility and actuality.
  • Normally, actualizing a positive capacity is an ascent; with despair, actually being in it is a descent from the merit of merely being able to be in it.
  • Not being in despair is not a static state but a continuous annihilating of the possibility of despair—it must be actively rendered impotent at every moment.
• Despair is the sickness unto death in a unique sense: the despairer cannot die because the eternal in the self cannot be consumed, so despair is an impotent self-consumption—eternally dying without dying.
  • The despairer in despair over something (e.g., not becoming Caesar) is really despairing over himself—he cannot bear to be rid of himself precisely because he cannot become what he desired, yet cannot cease to be.
  • Socrates proved the immortality of the soul from the fact that sin does not consume it as bodily sickness consumes the body; similarly, the fact that despair cannot consume the self proves the eternal in man.
• Despair has three forms defined by consciousness: being unconscious of having a self (inauthentic despair), not wanting in despair to be oneself (weakness), and wanting in despair to be oneself (defiance).
  • Both forms of conscious despair ultimately reduce to the same formula: to despair over oneself, in despair wanting to be rid of oneself, because the self one wants to be is a self severed from the power that established it.
  • The formula for the state in which no despair exists at all is: ‘in relating to itself and in wanting to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power that established it’—which is also the definition of faith.

The Generality of this Sickness (Despair)

Despair is far more universal than commonly assumed—virtually everyone is in some degree of despair—because the common view wrongly takes self-report as the criterion, whereas a proper spiritual diagnosis reveals that even the absence of felt despair, or contented worldliness, is itself a form of despair.

• Despair is nearly universal: the common assumption that only those who say they are in despair are in despair is wrong, because not being conscious of one’s despair is itself a form of despair—and the most common one.
  • Just as a physician does not accept a patient’s self-report as the definitive word on health, a ‘psychic expert’ with knowledge of what spirit requires will see despair where the sufferer sees only contentment.
  • No one outside Christendom is free from despair; in Christendom, no one who is not truly a Christian is free from it; and even professing Christians are in despair to the extent they fall short of genuine faith.
• Despair has a unique dialectic compared to physical illness: whereas a person can be healthy at one time and ill later, if someone is ever found to be in despair it becomes evident they were in despair their whole life—because despair relates to the eternal in the self.
  • With physical illness, a fever is new; but despair is a characteristic of spirit, related to the eternal, so its appearance retrospectively reveals its continuous presence throughout life.
  • Security and contentment may mean precisely that one is in despair; ’not being in despair may mean precisely to be in despair’—the dialectical nature of despair means every surface indicator is ambiguous.
• The most beautiful and fortunate worldly life—including the ideal of youthful feminine happiness—is nonetheless despair, because all immediacy lacks the specification of spirit and harbors dread at its core.
  • Immediate happiness is ’the greatest bad fortune never to have had’ despair; it is truly providential to get it, even though it is the most dangerous sickness if one does not want to be cured.
  • Worldliness consists of people who ‘pawn themselves to the world’—they may be praised, honored, and esteemed, yet ‘in a spiritual sense they have no self, no self for whose sake they could venture everything, no self for God.’
• The concealment of despair is itself part of its horror: despair can be so hidden that the sufferer is unaware of it, and eternity will reveal this hidden despair by nailing the self to itself so that it cannot be rid of itself.
  • Eternity asks only one question of each person: whether they have lived in despair or not—whether despairingly unconscious of it, bearing it as a gnawing secret, or raging in it openly.
  • Despairing unconsciousness is ’the most common form of despair’ and corresponds to what Christianity calls ’the world’ and paganism—it is despair without knowledge of being in despair.

The Forms of this Sickness (Despair)

Kierkegaard provides a detailed typology of despair’s forms by analyzing the self’s structural polarities (infinite/finite, possibility/necessity) and its levels of consciousness, showing a progressive intensification from unconscious despair through weakness to the highest form—defiant, demonic despair that consciously refuses God.

• Despair under the aspect of infinitude/finitude takes two forms: infinitude’s despair is the fantastic—losing oneself in imagination, emotion, or abstract understanding without returning to the concrete self—while finitude’s despair is despairing narrowness, becoming a copy or cipher by surrendering one’s primitiveness to ’the others.’
  • Imagination is the medium of infinitization; when feeling, understanding, or will become fantastic, the self is volatilized—it participates sensitively in abstract causes (like ‘humanity in abstracto’) while losing its actual self.
  • Finitude’s despair goes practically unnoticed; such a person is ‘ground as smooth as a pebble, as exchangeable as a coin of the realm’ and is regarded by the world as exactly what a human being ought to be.
• Despair under the aspect of possibility/necessity: possibility’s despair is running away from oneself into endless fantasy with no necessity to return to actuality, while necessity’s despair is the fatalist or petty bourgeois condition where possibility is choked out and faith—the conviction that for God everything is possible—is absent.
  • “The believer possesses the antidote to despair: ‘possibility; since for God everything is possible at every moment. This is the health of faith which resolves contradictions.’” —Anti-Climacus
  • The petty bourgeois is spiritless, absorbing himself in the probable; he has lured possibility into ’the cage of probability’ and thinks himself master, but is in fact captive to spiritlessness.
• The more consciousness the more intense the despair; the lowest form is despair ignorant of itself (spiritlessness resembling paganism), while conscious despair moves through weakness—not wanting to be oneself—to defiance—wanting in despair to be oneself.
  • Despair ignorant of itself is the most common and most dangerous form because the despairer is made safe against becoming aware—‘safely in the hands of despair’; the old Church Fathers’ claim that pagan virtues are ‘splendid vices’ expresses this: the heart of paganism is despair.
  • The pagan’s casual attitude toward suicide illustrates spiritless despair: lacking the God-relationship and the specification of self, suicide seemed inconsequential—its being a crime against God ‘altogether escapes the pagan.’
• Conscious despair of weakness (not wanting to be oneself) ranges from pure immediacy—which despairs passively over something external and wishes to be someone else—through immediacy with reflection, where the self retreats into ‘reserve,’ concealing its inner conflict behind a respectable outward life.
  • The purely immediate despairer does not even know himself except by externals (his coat); he has so little self that he wishes he could become someone else, like the drunken peasant who did not recognize his own legs because they now wore stockings and shoes.
  • The ‘reserved’ despairer is a deeper case: outwardly a competent husband, father, and citizen, he maintains solitude as a necessity of life and keeps his inner despair concealed; the danger for the absolutely reserved person is suicide.
• The highest and most intensified form of despair is defiance—wanting in despair to be oneself—in which the self, conscious of an infinite self, severs itself from the power that established it and attempts to construct itself by its own power, culminating in the demonic refusal to accept help or forgiveness.
  • In its active form, defiant despair is like Stoicism: the self is its own master, ‘absolutely its own master’—but ’exactly this is the despair’; it is ‘a king without a country’ whose rule is subject to rebellion at any moment.
  • In its passive-demonic form, the despairer takes eternal possession of his torment and rages against existence as evidence against God’s goodness; ‘he is frightened of eternity’ lest it take away the very misery that gives him, from the demonic viewpoint, ‘infinite superiority over other people.’

Part Two: Despair is Sin

Despair is Sin

Sin is defined as despair before God—the intensification of despair through the conception of God—and this section argues that sin is positive and affirmative (not merely a negation), that its opposite is faith rather than virtue, and that the Socratic definition of sin as ignorance is insufficient because it lacks the category of will and defiance.

• Sin is despair before God or with the conception of God; what makes sin ‘aggravated’ despair, in the way lawyers speak of aggravated crimes, is the infinite accent placed on the self by its standing before God.
  • The more conception of God, the more self; the more self, the more conception of God—and accordingly the more intense the sin when the self remains in despair before God.
  • The sin of paganism was the despairing ignorance of God and of being before God—’to be without God in the world’; paganism did not sin in the strictest sense because it did not sin before God, and all sin is before God.
• The opposition between sin and faith—not sin and virtue—is the decisive Christian distinction, because faith is the state in which the self, grounded transparently in God, is no longer in despair.
  • ‘Whatsoever is not of faith, is sin’ (Romans 14:23) is ‘one of the most crucial definitions for the whole of Christianity’: the opposite of sin is faith, not virtue, which is a pagan concept operating with a merely human standard.
  • A poet-existence inclined toward the religious illustrates the borderline between despair and sin: such a person loves God and suffers for God, yet cannot humble himself under the specific thorn in his flesh in faith, and so remains in despair—writing about the religious instead of being it.
• The higher the standard by which the self measures itself, the more intense the sin; a self before God as a ’theological self’ has infinite reality and therefore infinite responsibility, making sin infinitely more serious than in paganism.
  • As a herdsman who is a self before cattle is a very low self (no standard of measurement), a self before God is an infinite self; ‘what is qualitatively its standard of measurement is ethically its goal.’
  • Christianity’s doctrine that each single human being stands directly before God contains the ‘possibility of offence’—the paradox that God should be concerned with this one particular individual is too exalted for natural man to accept without being offended.
• The opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.
• The Socratic definition of sin as ignorance is insufficient because it cannot account for the will’s role in sin—Socrates cannot admit that someone knowingly does wrong—whereas Christianity holds that sin lies in the will’s defiance, which requires revelation rather than intellectual instruction to understand.
  • Socrates covers himself by saying that when someone does wrong they have not truly understood the right; Greek intellectuality posited an intellectual categorical imperative and lacked the courage to say a person knowingly refrains from the good.
  • In the life of spirit there is no standing still: if a person does not do the right thing immediately upon knowing it, knowledge ‘comes off the boil,’ the will lets time pass, and gradually knowledge deserts to the side of the will—making the Socratic account of the process correct but insufficient for the full Christian account.
• Sin is affirmative, not merely a negation; orthodox dogmatics is right to insist on this, and speculative philosophy’s attempt to ‘comprehend’ sin as affirmative is self-defeating because the act of comprehending negates what it posits.
  • The paradox of sin’s affirmative status—that it must be believed rather than comprehended—is the protection against speculative philosophy collapsing the qualitative difference between God and man.
  • Christianity sets sin up as so firmly affirmative that it seems impossible to remove—and then proposes the atonement as its removal ‘so completely that it is as though drowned in the ocean,’ which is the double paradox of sin and grace.
• Most people’s lives are so spiritless that they fall below the threshold of sin in the strict Christian sense, yet this spiritlessness is itself their fault—and Christendom, which has taken Christianity’s name in vain, is the context in which this mass spiritlessness flourishes.
  • That sin is rare in the strict sense does not mean most people are close to salvation; on the contrary, lives characterized by ‘dialectic of indifference’ are so far from faith as to be ’too spiritless to be called sin.’
  • Christendom is described as ‘a miserable edition of Christianity, full of misprints that distort the meaning’—priests defend Christianity with three reasons instead of proclaiming it with the enthusiasm of a lover, which betrays that they do not believe it.

The Continuation of Sin

Being in a state of sin is itself the new and greater sin—not just particular sinful acts—and the progression of sin through despairing over one’s sin, despairing of the forgiveness of sins, and finally declaring Christianity to be untruth represents an escalating intensification from defensive evasion to offensive war against God.

• Being in a state of sin is continuously new sin because every unrepented moment of sin is another sin; sin develops its own internal consistency and affirmative continuity, which deepens with each failure to get out of it.
  • “As Shakespeare’s Macbeth says, ‘Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill’: sin has an inner consistency and a continuity of evil that is only visible when one looks at the whole trajectory rather than particular acts.” —William Shakespeare
  • The demonic person, like a drunkard staying intoxicated to avoid the pain of sobriety, maintains sin’s internal consistency because he has a totality to lose; even the slightest sideways glance at the good could destabilize the whole.
• Despairing over one’s sin is the first intensification: instead of turning toward repentance and faith when confronted with sin, the self engrosses itself further in despair over its own weakness, cutting off access to the good by walling itself in.
  • Despair over sin is often mistaken for a sign of deep nature and profound conscience, but this is mystification: what looks like sorrow for sin is often pride that cannot bear the reminder of weakness, directing the distress away from God toward self-assertion.
  • As Mephistopheles in Faust correctly says, ’there is nothing more pitiful than a devil in despair’—here despair means weakening oneself enough to hearken to repentance and grace, which the demonically despairing self guards against above all.
• Despairing of the forgiveness of sins is a further intensification—offence at the very offer of grace—in which the self before Christ refuses the forgiveness that would require acknowledging one’s absolute dependence and smallness before God.
  • The self intensified before Christ—for whom Christ is the standard of measurement—has more self and therefore more intense sin; ’the more conception of Christ, the more self.’
  • To despair of forgiveness is to fight God at close range by going as far away as possible: ‘a person must be as far as possible from God for this No to be heard’—the strange acoustics of spirit mean that directness before God requires extreme distance.
• The highest intensification of sin is declaring Christianity to be untruth and falsehood—sin against the Holy Spirit—which is the positive, offensive form of offence that actively attacks Christianity rather than merely evading it.
  • The lowest form of offence leaves Christ undecided (‘I don’t wish to have any opinion’); the negative form stares at the paradox in paralysis; the positive form declares Christianity to be lies—this last is sin against the Holy Ghost.
  • Christianity’s teaching of the God-man contains the ‘possibility of offence’ as its essential dialectical protection; Christ himself says ‘Blessed is he who is not offended in me,’ which must be urged again and again in Christendom—wherever it is absent, the presentation of Christianity is blasphemy.
• The doctrines of sin and the individual are Christianity’s protection against speculative philosophy’s tendency to dissolve the particular into the universal, because sin—as something that must be believed rather than thought—resists the concept and insists on the concrete, particular sinner.
  • Speculative thought cannot think a particular human being or a particular sinner—it can only think ‘man’ or ‘sin’ in the abstract—but ‘seriousness is precisely that you and I are sinners’; the accent of seriousness lies on the individual sinner.
  • Christianity begins with the doctrine of sin and thereby begins with the individual: God in Christ deals only with particular human beings (sinners), not with ’the crowd’ or ’the public’ as abstractions—‘for God everything is possible, then God is that everything is possible.’