Upon learning that Kierkegaard was considered ‘the father of existentialism’ before opening The Sickness unto Death, I was expecting to encounter in the book ideas that are similar to that of those 20th century existentialists like Sartre and Camus (with the addition of some Christian themes). However, reading Alastair Hannay’s introduction made me realize that Kierkegaard’s argument did not at all contain the central and most well-known claim of existentialism, which is that “existence precedes essence,” although in a broader sense he still is considered existentialist.
“What Kierkegaard means by the choice of oneself is a decision to resort to a deep intuition about the true nature of selfhood, not an arbitrary selection from a cafeteria of alternatives…The intuition to be resorted to is that the model of true selfhood is that offered in the example of Christ” (Alastair Hannay)
According to Kierkegaard, there are three kinds of despair: being unconscious of having a self, not wanting to be oneself, feeling that one is not oneself. Only when one is finally able to “resort to the deep intuition” about true selfhood can he/she escape the state, and the true nature of selfhood is already determined. In the book Kierkegaard says that God is behind one’s having consciousness of himself—or having a soul.
Adopting Kierkegaard’s ideas and using them as a framework for understanding my day-to-day experiences and despair worked pretty well for me (and I could even find some consolation in this new way of looking at myself)
However, Anti-Climacus (the pseudonym under which Kierkegaard wrote the book) presupposes that God created man’s mind and body so that one would on some level, whether conscious or not, be drawn to the Creator. This preposition is the basis of the author’s argument, which is that denial or ignorance of this consciousness is the cause of all despair. I think this would make many non-believers reluctant to take this work seriously.
But I want to urge those people to just think about the possibility of our having some Christ-like aspect in ourselves, or the possibility of the existence of this “deep intuition.” All the horrible things that we see in the media may not allow for any such consideration; however, I believe that there certainly are, and have been. cases that do reveal our potential to resort to the way of Jesus.
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