The Sickness Unto Death

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) published The Sickness Unto Death in 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. The sickness of the title is despair — not the emotional state, but an ontological condition. Kierkegaard argues that every human being is in despair whether they know it or not, because despair is the failure to properly relate the self to itself and to God.

The book is structured as a psychological and philosophical anatomy of despair in all its forms: the despair of not knowing you are in despair, the despair of not willing to be yourself, the despair of willing to be yourself without relation to the power that established you. Kierkegaard’s analysis is razor-sharp and at times devastating.

This is Kierkegaard at his most concentrated and demanding. The prose is dense, the argument is layered, and the categories he introduces — the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious — remain among the most useful tools in existentialist thought. The Hong and Hong translation is the standard scholarly edition, with introduction and notes.

A foundational text of existentialism and one of the most searching works of Christian philosophy ever written.

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