The Sickness Unto Death

The “greatest psychologist of the spirit since St. Augustine” (Gregory R. Beabout), Søren Kierkegaard is renowned for such richly imagined philosophical works as Fear and Trembling and The Concept of Anxiety.Yet only The Sickness unto Death condenses his most essential ideas-on aesthetics, ethics and religion-into a single volume. First published in 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, The Sickness unto Death is as demanding as it is concise, posing fundamental yet complicated questions about human nature and the self.Beginning with the biblical story of Lazarus, whom Jesus miraculously raised from the dead, The Sickness unto Death identifies the titular “sickness” as “despair”, a state worse than death because it is “unto” death.As Kierkegaard demonstrates, despair-or, in Christian categories, “sin”-is a sickness not of the body but of the spirit and thus, of the self. A dramatic “medical history” of the course of this sickness, The Sickness unto Death culminates, as all medical hi