Chapter 13, The Sickness Unto Death Summary and Analysis

1848 is the height of Kierkegaard's productivity and The Sickness Unto Death is the first of the pieces written in 1848 to be published. It is among the greatest of Kierkegaard's works, although Kierkegaard thinks it is weak because it involves too much discussion to effectively use rhetoric. The book focuses on the ubiquitous despair present in human life and tries to produce an "anatomy" of it. The Anthology reproduces more of this work than any other of Kierkegaard's works.

The Sickness unto Death defines the spirit and the self. The person is a spirit, and the spirit is the self. The self, however, is a relation that relates to itself; in fact, it is the relation that accounts for that relation. In another way, the self is not the relation but is comprised by...