Despite his persistent polemics against the Hegelian
‘speculative’
philosophy, Kierkegaard recognized his own ‘enigmatic
respect for Hegel’, and one
of his pseudonyms (Johannes Climacus) even acknowledged that his
‘own energies are for the most part consecrated to the
service’ of speculation. Nowhere are
Kierkegaard's energies more productively devoted to
this service than in the work
of his last pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, The Sickness Unto
Death. In this essay, I argue
that not only are there structural parallels between the
anatomy of despair in The Sickness Unto Death and
the analysis of the ‘unhappy consciousness’
in Hegel's Phenomenology, but that there are
striking parallels in terms of the actual content of
the respective accounts. I develop these parallels in order,
finally, to reconsider the
terrain of difference between Kierkegaard's Christian
therapeutics of despair and
Hegel's phenomenological therapeutics.