The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition of Edification & Awakening by Anti-Climacus (Penguin Classics) Paperback – August 1, 1989

As I said in my review of FEAR AND TREMBLING, I came to this book because I neglected to read it during college and have always wanted to do so. At the same time, I learned that Wittgenstein thought that SK was the greatest philosopher of the nineteenth century. That nudged me to finally read the book. I found THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH to be more difficult than FEAR AND TREMBLING. It is, however, similar in its overall structure. It begins with a gospel passage, using it as a springboard for an extended meditation. Here, the passage is the raising of Lazarus.Lazarus is dead, but Jesus says that he really isn’t (because Jesus can bring him back to life, which he does). Lazarus then actually died later (but not really, because his eternal soul persisted after the death of his physical body). Thus, Lazarus illustrates the nature of the human individual. We are caught between finitude and infinitude and this leads to the attitudes and behaviors which characterize our nature/plight.The ongoing subject of SK’s reflections is the nature of despair and its relationship to identity, to faith and to human psychology. The reflections are very complex and I did not find the introductory material to be particularly helpful. As with FEAR AND TREMBLING, I recommend that the reader peruse the prefatory material after reading the book, not before.The core of SK’s argument is, I think, the following: “The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude, which relates to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can only be done in the relationship to God . . . . a self, every moment it exists, is in a process of becoming . . . . In so far, then, as the self does not become itself, it is not itself; but not to be oneself is exactly despair” (pp. 59-60). Faith is crucial: “The believer possesses the ever-sure antidote to despair: possibility; since for God everything is possible at every moment. This is the health of faith which resolves contradictions” (p. 70).The evolutionary nature of the self is very interesting, since it aligns SK with Goethe’s FAUST, where the notion of evolution is pivotal. (Darwin himself came later, but evolutionary thought is pervasive in the late eighteenth century.) This notion of the fluid self, evolving, changing and developing is, of course, central to the thought of the existentialists who were heavily influenced by SK.Bottom line: a rich and complex meditation on the nature of human identity and its relation to faith.

The work itself is amazing, Soren Kierkegaard is a giant among philosophy.BUT, this publisher is a joke. The organization of the book is completely out of line with conventions for translation. All other translations follow the order that Kiekegaard laid out, Part 1 and Part 2, sections A, B, C etc. But this publisher simply labels them as individual chapters. This undermines the organizational structure of the work and also makes it useless if citing it for academic work. Also, no translator's name is given even though it is clearly a translation.Buy a real translationWish I could return but already marked up part of it before I realized how bad it was.

This review is devoted exclusively to the Kindle edition, which is literally broken. It costs 2 1/2 times the price of the other Kindle edition, which is only modest as most Kindle editions go, but by comparing it with a hard copy from Princeton, I am assured that it has the complete text. This edition seems at the very least to have radically broken pagination. The Preface (written by Kierkegaard) is missing, and it seems as if much of the Introduction is missing. What would normally be on one page is often smeared across a dozen or more pages. The Kindle Edition, taken from a Penguin paper edition, is plainly broken. Buy the $1.99 edition. It ain't great, but its readable.

I ordered this thinking that it couldn't be that hard to find a reliable translation of this text. I assumed that 'well the text is pretty hard to mess up so it all comes down to nitpicking the translation and some footnotes".Holy wow was I wrong. This publication is obviously scanned from another text with disconnected notation marks 1inserted into2 the text3, words improperly scanned (e.g, mirror will be used in one sentence only to show up as "minor" in the next) and paragraphs that look like they went through babelfish. I can't even find a contact email to complain to the publisher about their shoddy publishing job!At least the cover's nice I guess?

This is one of the most beautiful deeply intellectual books I’ve ever read "it looks at the matter of believe from philosophical and psychological pint of view" and addresses the concept of despair from existentialist point of view taking into consideration that this book has been written before the concept of existentialist took a shap

This book was amazing and I read just because the title sounded so cool. Starting on "Fear & Trembling" ASAP

one of the best books I ever read. give a deep, accurate definition of what sin is. “Sin is building our identities and self-worth on anything other than God”

Along with "Fear and Trembling" probably SKs most important work. We have not fathomed it yet.