The Sickness Unto Death
Søren Kierkegaard · 1849
"Despair — a misrelation in the self's relation to itself — is a near-universal spiritual condition, most dangerous precisely when it goes unnoticed, and its cure is not happiness but a self that 'rests transparently in the power that established it.'"
Writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard defines the self not as a thing but as a relation — 'a relation that relates itself to itself' — something that exists only when a person actively takes a stand on their own existence rather than passively drifting. 'The sickness unto death' is despair, but stranger than sadness: a structural failure to be a self at all, and — the sharpest part — most people carrying it don't know they have it, because it can look exactly like an ordinary, successful life.
He maps despair into forms: in despair, not wanting to be oneself (weakness), and in despair, wanting to be oneself entirely on one's own terms rather than the terms one was given (defiance) — the second is subtler and more common among people who look accomplished, because building an identity entirely out of your own will, answerable to nothing outside yourself, is itself a kind of despair. The opposite of despair, for Kierkegaard, isn't happiness — it's faith: a self that rests in, rather than fights, the ground of its own existence.
According to Kierkegaard, what makes despair so dangerous?
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The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- D. Anthony Storm's Commentary on The Sickness Unto Deathsorenkierkegaard.org
- The Sickness unto DeathWikipedia
Existentialism Is a Humanism
"Sartre's central claim, 'existence precedes essence' — humans have no predetermined nature or purpose; we define ourselves entirely through the choices we make, and that total freedom is also total responsibility."