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Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death

1849 · Copenhagen (Copenhagen, Denmark)

In 1849 Kierkegaard publishes The Sickness Unto Death under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus: despair is the sickness unto death, the self's refusal or failure to be itself before God. The book's anatomy of despair becomes the tradition's deepest account of the human condition, read by theologians and atheists alike.

Tagged: Existentialism

The Event

Date
1849 (exact)
Era
The Nineteenth-Century Sources; Standard periodization of existentialist history
Location
Copenhagen; today Copenhagen, Denmark
Traditions
Existentialism
Streams
Existentialism
Key figures
Søren Kierkegaard
Key texts
The Sickness Unto Death

Connections

Illustration for Kierkegaard's Either/Or History Event Kierkegaard's Either/Or 1843 completes the anatomy of the self the earlier work began

Primary Sources

  • Kierkegaard, Søren (as Anti-Climacus). Sygdommen til Døden. Copenhagen, 1849.

Secondary Sources

  • Gordon, Lewis R. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. New York: Routledge, 1995.
  • Kaufmann, Walter, ed. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: Meridian, 1956.
  • Solomon, Robert C. Existentialism. New York: Oxford University Press, second edition, 2005.

Provenance: HIST-1421; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-30.

Related on This Site

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