The Sickness Unto Death Chapter 1
05-27-2026
Overview
At the start of this work Kierkegaard lays the groundwork for the ideas that he wants to discussAlbeit in a very verbose and somewhat confusing manner at the start. A few questions right off the bat that he answers is:
- What is despair?
- What is the self? The spirit?
- What are the different types of despair?
The self, to Kierkegaard or the pseudonym he published under, Anti-ClimacusA "higher" self, at least when comapred to both one of his previous pseudonyms Climacus as well as Kierkegaard himself, is a relation that relates to itself. A human being, he follows, is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, the temporal and the eternal, and finally the freedom and the necessity. Part of what makes Kierkegaard hard to digest is how he just shoves very abstract ideas in your face from the jump. Its imperative then that we have a solid understanding of these before moving on.
Humanity is infinite and finite because an individual exists for a discrete, finite amount of time. Yet our capacity for things like imagination, abstractio