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.
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