In the Library
The Sickness Unto Death
Søren Kierkegaard (Anti-Climacus), 1849
- Form
- Form Philosophy
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 3 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Translated for The Daily Canon
- Original
- Original da
- Chapters
- Chapters 5
- Length
- Length 45k words
£1.99
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The self is a relation that relates itself to itself.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
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The reading guide, in the app
How to Read The Sickness Unto Death
Despite its grim title and its reputation for abstraction, this is one of the most recognisable books ever written about the feeling of being slightly wrong inside yourself.
The title scares people off before the first page, and the opening pages, with their apparatus of synthesis and relation and the self relating itself to itself, have sent more readers away than anything in the text that follows. What the reputation leaves out is that Kierkegaard is not building an abstract system; he is performing a diagnosis, and the condition he is diagnosing is one that most people who have ever lain awake at three in the morning already know from the inside, that peculiar, low-grade wrongness of living slightly beside yourself, of not quite being the person you thought you were going to become.
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About the book
You can be busy, well-liked, untroubled, and entirely lost to yourself, and this is the book that will tell you so. Writing as Anti-Climacus, a height of Christian faith he openly placed above his own, Kierkegaard recasts despair as something far stranger than sadness: a quiet misrelation in which the self refuses to become the self it was made to be, refuses to rest in the power that grounds it. He builds the argument as a taxonomy, three forms of despair across three shapes of selfhood, and the unbearable thing is how precisely each one finds you. The despair that does not know it is despair, he insists, is not the gentlest but the deadliest; to feel completely at home in the world is already to have misplaced your soul. And the sickness named in the title cannot do the one thing sickness does. It will not kill. It only keeps you dying, awake to a wound you have spent a lifetime calling contentment.