Book contents
- Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death
- Cambridge Critical Guides
- Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Kierkegaard’s Place of Rest
- Chapter 2 Publishing The Sickness unto Death
- Chapter 3 Kierkegaard on the Self and the Modern Debate on Selfhood
- Chapter 4 From Here to Eternity
- Chapter 5 Kierkegaard’s Metaphysics of the Self
- Chapter 6 The Experience of Possibility (and of Its Absence)
- Chapter 7 Sin, Despair, and the Self
- Chapter 8 Sin and Virtues
- Chapter 9 Despair as Sin
- Chapter 10 Fastening the End and Knotting the Thread
- Chapter 11 Despair the Disease and Faith the Therapeutic Cure
- Chapter 12 The Long Journey to Oneself
- Chapter 13 Accountability to God in The Sickness unto Death
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Critical Guides
Chapter 13 - Accountability to God in The Sickness unto Death
Kierkegaard’s Relational Understanding of the Human Self
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 August 2022
- Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death
- Cambridge Critical Guides
- Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Kierkegaard’s Place of Rest
- Chapter 2 Publishing The Sickness unto Death
- Chapter 3 Kierkegaard on the Self and the Modern Debate on Selfhood
- Chapter 4 From Here to Eternity
- Chapter 5 Kierkegaard’s Metaphysics of the Self
- Chapter 6 The Experience of Possibility (and of Its Absence)
- Chapter 7 Sin, Despair, and the Self
- Chapter 8 Sin and Virtues
- Chapter 9 Despair as Sin
- Chapter 10 Fastening the End and Knotting the Thread
- Chapter 11 Despair the Disease and Faith the Therapeutic Cure
- Chapter 12 The Long Journey to Oneself
- Chapter 13 Accountability to God in The Sickness unto Death
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Critical Guides
Summary
Kierkegaard is well-known as a philosopher who stresses the meaning of individual human existence. However, in The Sickness unto Death he argues that the human self exists as “spirit,” and spiritual life is essentially relational life. The significance of this is sometimes missed because readers assume that the “other” to which humans must relate is God, and a God-relation does not seem genuinely social. This view is doubly mistaken, and this can be seen if the relationship between the two parts of the book are understood. First, it is not true that Kierkegaard thinks that God is the only “other” by which the self can be defined. Human beings continually seek to ground their identity in many “others” and human persons and groups are the major way this happens. Kierkegaard believes this is the source of numerous pathological forms of selfhood; far from being impossible, grounding the self in something other than God is ubiquitous. Second, the relation to God is for Kierkegaard a genuinely social relation, since God is viewed as one who has the authority to give human lives meaning by assigning meaningful vocations to humans and holding them accountable for fulfilling those vocations.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto DeathA Critical Guide, pp. 219 - 236Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022