Kierkegaard: The Sickness unto Death (Princeton, 1980)

Søren Kierkegaard: The Sickness Unto Death. Vol. XIX of Kierkegaard's Writings, edited and translated, with introduction and notes, by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1980.

ISBN 9780691020280 | 256 pages | PDF

A companion piece to The Concept of Anxiety, this work continues Søren Kierkegaard's radical and comprehensive analysis of human nature in a spectrum of possibilities of existence. Present here is a remarkable combination of the insight of the poet and the contemplation of the philosopher.

In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard moves beyond anxiety on the mental-emotional level to the spiritual level, where -- in contact with the eternal -- anxiety becomes despair. Both anxiety and despair reflect the misrelation that arises in the self when the elements of the synthesis -- the infinite and the finite -- do not come into proper relation to each other. Despair is a deeper expression for anxiety and is a mark of the eternal, which is intended to penetrate temporal existence.

Kierkegaard's Writings is a definitive, systematically translated, scholarly edition of Søren Kierkegaard's works in English, comprising twenty-five volumes of text and a separate cumulative index. Each volume includes a historical introduction, selections from Kierkegaard's journals and provisional manuscripts, notes and an index.

Review

"The definitive edition of the Writings. The first volume . . . indicates the scholarly value of the entire series: an introduction setting the work in the context of Kierkegaard's development; a remarkably clear translation; and concluding sections of intelligent notes." -- Library Journal