The sickness to death

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The Illness to Death ( Danish Sygdommen til Døden ), published in 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus , is one of Søren Kierkegaard's later works. From the perspective of Christianity, it deals with the existential problem of despair. The work is divided into two sections.

The title "Illness to Death" is introduced by Kierkegaard in connection with Lazarus . The introduction discusses the contradiction that exists between the statements “This disease is not to die” ( Jn 11.4  Lut ) and “Lazarus died” ( Jn 11.14  Lut ). The expression “illness to death” also occurs in Johann Wolfgang Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther , but there it is only related to the situation of the title hero. Kierkegaard has dealt extensively with Goethe's work.

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first section

In the first section, Kierkegaard begins by characterizing man as an infinite self. This self presents itself as a relationship that relates to itself. Accordingly, there are different levels in which something behaves. On the lowest level are the three relationships between finitude and infinity, between possibility (freedom) and necessity, and between temporality and eternity.

The self shows itself in how it consciously relates to these relationships. But this conscious synthesis alone is not enough to determine the self. According to Kierkegaard, this is not freely selectable, but has been set. He attributes this activity to God. If one is dissatisfied with this self, there are different ways of living with it. These are all observable for the observer in society, but all lead to the same fundamental problem, despair . And according to Kierkegaard, despair is deathly illness.

At the beginning, the concept of illness in connection with despair is explained in more detail. So is z. B. flu is a disease of the body. You contract it once and then suffer from it for a while. The end of such a disease is healing or death of the body. The clinical picture of despair is completely different. So every moment you have the opportunity to be aware of your dissatisfaction with yourself, you are automatically desperate. So you keep contracting the disease anew. And since it is not an illness of the finite body, but of the infinite spirit, death is not the end of illness. It is the eternal sniffing down of a spirit whose impossible death would be a salvation worth striving for. The only way to cure such a disease is to absolutely extinguish its possibility after it has been lived through.

Kierkegaard considers the types of despair, on the one hand, under the moments of synthesis of the relationship that relates to itself, on the other hand, under the degree of awareness of how aware the self is of its own power and of the power it poses. Kierkegaard categorizes desperation into three levels depending on its severity.

With the level of awareness, the level of despair increases. If someone who is aware of despair is much closer to their healing, they are much more desperate than those who are not aware of it.

It is clear to Kierkegaard that healing is possible. However, in order for one to be cured, there are some essential conditions. For one thing, you have to be aware of the desperation. On the other hand, you have to realize that there is something that your own self has set. For healing, one has to give up one's imaginary (and this word hits it in two ways) in order to gain the originally correct self. For this one must humbly place oneself under God with all strengths and weaknesses of the self. The general despair shows that this is difficult. So it is not difficult to find the desperate, but extremely difficult to find those who have overcome their despair and have found their former selves again. According to Kierkegaard, the only way out of despair is to Christianity.

second part

The second section of the work is about sin. For Kierkegaard this is a despair before God. A sin is only possible for Christians, because, according to Kierkegaard, it is only possible for a Christian to know the revelation of Christ and still despair. So the opposite of sin is Christian faith. Kierkegaard explains sin as a willful ignorance. Because if we recognize something is right, this does not mean that our will wants to accept it. What is known cannot please our will at all.

output

  • Søren Kierkegaard: The sickness to death. Rowohlt, Munich 1969.

literature

  • Jürgen Boomgaarden: The lost self. An interpretation of Søren Kierkegaard's book “The Sickness to Death”. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2016, ISBN 978-3-525-56447-9 .
  • Romano Guardini : On the sense of sadness. The starting point of Sören Kierkegaard's thought movement. Matthias Grünewald Verlag, Mainz 1983, ISBN 3-7867-1073-2
  • Klaus Viertbauer: God at the bottom of consciousness? Sketches of a pre-reflective interpretation of Kierkegaard's self (= ratio fidei 61). Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-7917-2888-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Victor A. Schmitz: Goethe in the Danish Romanticism. In: ders .: Danish poets in their encounter with German classical and romantic periods . Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 1974, ISBN 3-465-01091-4 , p. 115.