Soren Kierkegaard

parts, consisting ofThe Sickness unto DeathandRadical Cure, but during the
ensuing months the plan was reshuffled, and on May 13, 1848, he produced
a “report ”on his work in progress: “This book has a difficulty. It is too
dialectical and rigorous to permit the proper use of the rhetorical, the arous-
ing, the soul-stirring. The title itself seems to indicate that it is supposed to
be discourses; the title is lyrical. ”Kierkegaard added that perhaps the book
ought not be published at all but that in any case it had provided him with
an “excellent schematic ”that could help him chart his course in the future,
when he had to write edifying discourses. Then, in the margin, he set forth
some of the typical characteristics of the sickness unto death: “No. 1. Its
hiddenness. Not only that the person who has it... would wish to hide it.
No, the frightful thing is that it is so hidden that a person can have it without
knowing it. No. 2, its universality. For every other sickness is limited in
one way or another, by climate, age group, et cetera. No. 3, its persistence,
through all ages—into eternity. No. 4, where does it have its abode? In the
self. The despairing ignorance of having a self; while knowing one has a
self, in despair not to want to be oneself, or in despair to want to be oneself.”
These are the first brush strokes in Kierkegaard’s depiction of the topog-
raphy of despair as a fundamental human condition, in a manner similar to
his treatment of anxiety four years earlier. With his “excellent schematic”
he hit upon the opening portion ofThe Sickness unto Death, which employed
dizzyingly dialectical cadences in its definition of a human being as a synthe-
sis: “A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what
is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself, or it is the relation’s
relating itself to itself in that relation. The self is not the relation; rather, it
isthatthe relation relates itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the
infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and
necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two terms.
Considered in this way, a human being is not yet a self.”
This schematic is so concise that it is itself almost enough to bring a person
to despair. But at other pointsThe Sickness unto Deathis quite tractable, and
unlikeThe Concept of Anxiety, which essentially comes rather close to being
unreadable,The Sickness unto Deathtakes pains not to forget its reader. Simi-
larly, there are places where the book does what it can to remind the reader
of its author, not only existentially but also in a material sense. ForThe
Sickness unto Deathis in fact a book in which thebalancebetween the individ-
ual elements in the self-synthesis is as important asharmonywas to the neo-
classical house in Rosenborggade where it was written.
Kierkegaard had already demonstrated his knowledge of the details of
modern multistory dwellings inThe Concept of Anxiety, where he wrote
that the customary procedures of a psychological observer provided the