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.
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