The Sickness Unto Death: Kierkegaard's Concept of Despair

A work of «psychology»

Kierkegaard presents The Sickness Unto Death, on its own title page, as a work of «psychology». He publishes it in 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that his idea of what a self is takes shape here more clearly than anywhere else in his writing. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy places it in Kierkegaard’s «second authorship», alongside Works of Love, published in 1847, and Practice in Christianity, from 1850.

The pseudonym’s name is not an accident. Anti-Climacus is built as the counterpart to another of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus. For the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the book’s two central concepts are despair and the self.

What the self is, for Anti-Climacus

Anti-Climacus opens the work with this definition: the self is a relation that relates to itself. He is quick to flag a point easy to miss: the self is not the relation as such, but the fact that the relation relates to itself. It only takes a moment to see why: being made of body and soul, of the finite and the infinite, is only half the story. The other half is how that mixture relates to itself.

Anti-Climacus goes on to define the self as a conscious synthesis of the infinite and the finite, whose task, becoming itself, can only be carried out through a relation to God. The question of what makes an individual truly themselves, rather than just a particular case of a wider category, runs through the history of Western philosophy, from Aristotle and Plato onward, before Kierkegaard recast it as an inward relation.

Example: someone facing a major choice who asks «am I really the one choosing, or am I just following what others expect of me» is, in Anti-Climacus’s terms, questioning their own self as a relation. Acting is not enough: what matters is how that acting relates to the one who does it.

Despair as a sickness of the spirit

Anti-Climacus explicitly defines despair as a sickness of the spirit, of the self. The title of the book comes from this definition.

He calls the condition «the sickness unto death» for a precise reason: it describes a continuous dying that keeps renewing itself without ever reaching an end. The torment of despair, for Anti-Climacus, lies precisely in not being able to die: the end of physical life does not settle it. To convey how widespread the condition is, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy cites an image of Anti-Climacus’s: most people live in a house of several floors, and choose to stay in the basement, away from their own higher spiritual dimension.

The forms of despair

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy identifies several forms of despair in the book. A table helps compare them.

Someone unaware of their own despair, for Anti-Climacus, is also the furthest from recognizing themselves as spirit. In the despair of possibility, by contrast, a person loses touch with necessity: for Anti-Climacus, necessity alone, without possibility, suffocates the spirit, while possibility serves it like oxygen. Once despair becomes aware of why it refuses to be itself, it takes the form of defiance.

Example: someone who spends their days imagining alternative lives they never actually try to live is, in Anti-Climacus’s terms, close to the despair of possibility: an imagined world cut off from reality, never tested against any real commitment.

Why the self needs God

For Anti-Climacus, the human self cannot relate to itself in isolation: it always does so by relating to another. For the self to be well, free of the despair this sickness names, that other has to be God. Anti-Climacus goes as far as writing that someone without God has no self either: it is the most extreme form of despair, willing to be oneself apart from God.

This grounding outside the self sets Anti-Climacus’s proposal apart from other philosophical answers to the question of how to live well. Kant’s categorical imperative, for instance, places the origin of the moral law in each individual’s own reason, not in a personal relation to a divinity. A healthy self, for Anti-Climacus, is «grounded transparently» in the power that posited it: a demand for self-knowledge that echoes, from entirely different premises, Socrates’s call to know oneself before being able to say anything true about oneself.