The Sickness Unto Death
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
One of the most remarkable philosophical works of the nineteenth century, The Sickness Unto Death is also famed for the depth and acuity of its modern psychological insights. Writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard explores the concept of 'despair', alerting readers to the diversity of ways in which they may be described as living in this state of bleak abandonment - including some that may seem just the opposite - and offering a much-discussed formula for the eradication of despair. With its penetrating account of the self, this late work by Kierkegaard was hugely influential upon twentieth-century philosophers including Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The Sickness unto Death can be regarded as one of the key works of theistic existentialist thought - a brilliant and revelatory answer to one man's struggle to fill the spiritual void.
About the Author
Kierkegaard (1813-55) was born in Copenhagen, the youngest of seven children. His childhood was unhappy, clouded by the religious fervour of his father, and the death of his mother, his sisters and two brothers. Educated at the School of Civic Virtue, he went on study theology, liberal arts and science at university, gaining a reputation for his academic brilliance and extravagant social life. He began to criticize Christianity, and in 1841 broke off his engagement to concentrate on his writing. Over the next ten years he produced a flood of works, in particular twelve major philosophical essays, many written under noms de plume. By the end of his life he had become an object of public ridicule, but he is now enjoying increasing acclaim.
Alastair Hannay was educated at the Edinburgh Academy, the University of Edinburgh and University College London. In 1961 he became a resident of Norway and is now Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
39 of 40 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you really want to know where modernity's notion of despair claims it genesis then read the "Sickness Unto Death" It was Kierkegaard who coined despair as a "sickness unto death" and as a sickness of the self. Kierkegaard himself lived a life full of death, sadness, melancholy and malaise, so it comes to no surprise that he would write about despair. The Sickness Unto Death is all about despair, its different forms, how it manifests itself, where it comes from and how it is related to sin. It is a Christian dialectic on despair in man. Kierkegaard imitates Socrates, dialectically extrapolating despair in a constant interplay between relation and misrelation. Man is a synthesis of infinitude and finitude. But often a misrelation occurs and man is unaware of being in despair. That is despair's specific character, that it is unaware of itself. No one wants to be in despair. Kierkegaard's grim conclusion is that most of us conceal our despair. Christian or not, everyone has despaired, and in some extent, at any point in one's life, is still in some degree in despair according to Kierkegaard. Persons of skewed immediacy and misdirected reflections: their immediacy conceals despair, conceals the infinite within. He cannot pinpoint his pain because he has no self; he has no self that he is aware. He is immediacy. Reflection can help. Though, reflection is not the antidote in of itself; it will not save you alone. Life is absurd. Man has lost love. Man has fallen into despair and sin because of his weakness. Despair as weakness equates to sin. Kierkegaard is right in his dialectic: we conceal a deeper, infinitely related despair, but the problem is how deep can we know our own despair? Kierkegaard's book, while it may be a little dry, is great for getting a head start in understanding a condition that seems to be universal: for those who believe in a god and those who don't. Heidegger would call it everydayness, some contemporaries call it malaise. Kierkegaard called it the sickness unto death. Once you get past the first chapter the rest falls into place. If you allow Kierkegaard to speak to you, allow the text to open your mind to a greater awareness of self then I think you will be blessed. You may, though, be just as lost as before you read the book -- but if you are looking for a great philosophical work on despair ... not fluff or mush ... but something substantial, not your everyday, malaise ridden dime novel, but hard core, concise, dialectically composed text, then go for Soren Kierkegaard "The Sickness Unto Death".
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
9 reviews
29 of 30 people found the following review helpful
Accepting Despair
15 Dec 2000
Format:Paperback
In perhaps his most relentless probing of the human condition, Kierkegaard's "The Sickness Unto Death" rediscovers the very notion of "sin." Having been tossed around by anyone and everyone in the Danish Christendom of his day, the word "sin" has lost much of it's original meaning; hence he chooses the term "despair." By doing this, Kierekgaard rediscovers "original sin," or that notion of sin which has been lost through misuse. For Kierkegaard, "despair" or "sin" is not simply an individual act, but it is a state of existence. Only when an individual acknowledges the inherent human situation, one that is "in despair," can one then "actively despair" and move out of the aesthetic mire of common existence. It should be noted that it is an ill advised version of Christianity which is "in despair," such a Christian wanting a simple solution without having to face the terrifying problem of our being. Kierkegaard not only documents the different levels of "despair" (no one type is exclusive of others), but he looks into why it is that we often refuse to accept our condition, such denial forcing us to remain "in despair." As he himself makes clear, "The very nature of despair is that it is unaware of being despair." There are endless implications from such an important work, not least of which is the idea that words can hold as well as lose their meaning, depending on how they are used and who is using them. But over and above a theory of semiotics is Kierkegaard's belief that authentic Christianity can only arise for the one who faces his/her desperate situation; and upon doing so, sees no other way out than total submission to "the Power that posited it."
20 of 24 people found the following review helpful
Life Changing
8 May 2009
Format:Paperback
Please indulge me only a brief autobiographical reflection on this singularly impressive work of the great Dane.
I was assigned this book in the spring of 1976 for a History of Modern Philosophy course at the University of Northern Colorado. Having cut my philosophical teeth on Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, and being in the heady environment of the state university (albeit not a distingushed one), I had, in a protracted fit of post-adolescent pseudo-intellectualism, thrown of the light religion of my youth and was endeavoring to embrace atheism. Thank God, I would eventually fail in this.
I wrote a short essay against SK for my class, but had not taken on this formidable volume, relying only on secondary sources. But then one night, after a bizarre dream that covertyly indicated my alienation from God, I picked up the book and began reading--not at the beginning, but at a random place. Then the book began to read me. It explained my "despair" as form of rebellion against God. "Defiant despair" is what SK called it: despair that finds its meaning in being miserable in its rebellion against God. He called it the most "potentiated" (or full-bloodied) form of despair.
I saw myself in the dense and psychologically thick description. SK read my soul in Christian terms, and it disarmed and alarmed me. This marked a turning point; about a month later, I gave up this despair and instead embraced the Christian message. A few years later I taught through this demanding and rewarding book in a class at the University of Oregon--the only time I have done so in all my years of teaching.
I part company with SK's rejection of rational apologetics (natural theology and historical evidences for Christianity); however, his divination of the soul, his art of uncovering the soul's escape mechanisms, his ability to bring one before God through this writing...is uncanny. Call it subjective apologetics. Call it brilliant.
I was assigned this book in the spring of 1976 for a History of Modern Philosophy course at the University of Northern Colorado. Having cut my philosophical teeth on Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, and being in the heady environment of the state university (albeit not a distingushed one), I had, in a protracted fit of post-adolescent pseudo-intellectualism, thrown of the light religion of my youth and was endeavoring to embrace atheism. Thank God, I would eventually fail in this.
I wrote a short essay against SK for my class, but had not taken on this formidable volume, relying only on secondary sources. But then one night, after a bizarre dream that covertyly indicated my alienation from God, I picked up the book and began reading--not at the beginning, but at a random place. Then the book began to read me. It explained my "despair" as form of rebellion against God. "Defiant despair" is what SK called it: despair that finds its meaning in being miserable in its rebellion against God. He called it the most "potentiated" (or full-bloodied) form of despair.
I saw myself in the dense and psychologically thick description. SK read my soul in Christian terms, and it disarmed and alarmed me. This marked a turning point; about a month later, I gave up this despair and instead embraced the Christian message. A few years later I taught through this demanding and rewarding book in a class at the University of Oregon--the only time I have done so in all my years of teaching.
I part company with SK's rejection of rational apologetics (natural theology and historical evidences for Christianity); however, his divination of the soul, his art of uncovering the soul's escape mechanisms, his ability to bring one before God through this writing...is uncanny. Call it subjective apologetics. Call it brilliant.
17 of 23 people found the following review helpful
Or, one could write diary of a suffering theologian,perhaps?
29 April 2002
Format:Paperback
Herein lies many of Kierkegaard's most vehement attacks on his utter disgust as what he sees as the shallow and hypocritical Christians of his time. In fact, the rantings rank up there with Nietzsche's tirades against what he liked to call the "rabble."
As you may have guessed by the title, this is not to be an uplifting book. Kierkegaard will never be mistaken for Robert Schuller - that much is for certain. In it, the Danish philosopher (generally considered the father of existentialism) grapples with guilt. Not just anyone's guilt, either, but Soren Kierkegaard's guilt. In page after page he discerns how man's sinful nature is corruptive to his relationship to God. What is worse, no matter how hard he tries, he can't stop sinning any more than he can consciously stop breathing.
Kierkegaard then looks up from his desk and wonders why all those so-called Christians out there aren't doing the same thing that he is. The Dane is introspective, to say the least, and the nucleus of his thought emanates from Socrates' words at his trial, as recorded in Plato's APOLOGY:
...I say again that the greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living
- Plato, APOLOGY, Trans: B Jowett
Here is a great man's attempt to follow the dictum of Socrates, and examine his own life. In this sense, THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH is comparable to St. Augustine's CONFESSIONS, albeit a bit on the morbid side.
One of the Dane's favorite metaphors was of driver falling asleep at the reigns of his wagon. So too did K believe that that is how most of us live our lives. With this in mind, it is not surprising that he anoints this work as an "awakening" for his readers.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > History > Religious History > Christianity
- Books > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Christian Living
- Books > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Church History
- Books > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Theology
- Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Philosophy
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Philosophy
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
