Søren Kierkegaard. The Sickness Unto Death. Translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2023. Hardcover. 224 pp. $26.95.

Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death, published in 1949 and attributed by Kierkegaard to the pseudonym Anti-Climacus (with his own name on the title page as editor), is one of Kierkegaard’s most important and influential books. Although parts of the book are readable and convey Kierkegaard’s ability to write beautiful and poetic prose, the opening sections are legendarily difficult and abstract, a translator’s nightmare (some examples will be provided later). Kierkegaard himself was well aware of the challenge this provided and described the book as “algebraic” in form.

I am happy to report that Bruce Kirmmse, one of the foremost Kierkegaard scholars of our time, is up to the challenge of conveying, to the extent that this is possible, the effect Kierkegaard intended for his Danish readers. Although Kirmmse, in his introduction, is generous in his assessment of earlier translations, my judgment is that this is the best English version of this important book. Kirmmse, who was trained as an historian but knowledgeable about Kierkegaard as a philosopher and theologian, is the author of Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, still the definitive work situating Kierkegaard in the context of nineteenth century Denmark and Europe. Kirmmse, who has lived off and on in Denmark for much of his life, is also the translator of the English edition of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, putting into English the relevant portions of Søren Kierkegaard’s Skrifter, the definitive scholarly edition of Kierkegaard’s published and unpublished writings. Given these accomplishments, I expected this to be a fine translation and those expectations were satisfied.

In the beginning of The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard provides a triply relational account of the nature of the human self, understood as “spirit.” The self is described as a “synthesis” of contrasting elements (temporality and eternity, finitude and infinitude, necessity and possibility). However, this relational synthesis is an active achievement of a self “that relates itself to itself.” This self-relating is in turn made possible by a relation of the self to an “other.” Here is how the key opening passage is rendered in the Princeton edition of the translation by Howard and Edna Hong: “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself, or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.” (13) Here is the same passage as rendered by Kirmmse: “The self is a relation that relates to itself, or it is that in the relation which is the relation’s relating to itself. The self is not the relation but is that the relation relates to itself.” (19) The differences are obviously slight, and the Danish word for “that” is not italicized in the original, but in my view the freedom Kirmmse shows here successfully makes Kierkegaard’s intended meaning clearer.

Here is another interesting passage from Kirmmse: “…only that person’s life was wasted who lived in such a fashion that, deceived by life’s joys or its sorrows, he never became eternally, decisively conscious of himself as spirit, as self, or, what amounts to the same thing, never became aware and never in the deepest sense gained the impression that there is a God, and that ‘he,’ himself, his self exists before God—an infinite gain that is never attained except through despair” (36). The Hongs translate the Danish word in the last clause that Kirmmse renders as “gain” by “benefaction,” a term that seems unnecessarily archaic and fussy, a fault that is not infrequent in the Hong translations.

Here is another key passage from later in the book from the Hong translation: “If losing oneself in possibility may be compared with a child’s utterance of vowel sounds, then lacking possibility would be the same as being dumb. The necessary is like pure consonants, but to express them there must be possibility.” Kirmmse renders the same passage like this: “If one were to compare running wild in possibility with a child’s efforts at pronouncing vowels, then lacking possibility is like being dumb. Necessity, as it were, is solely composed of consonants, but to pronounce them, possibility is required” (49). “Running wild in possibility” is both closer to the Danish here and more vivid. Such examples could be multiplied.

The Hong translation is accurate, as are other recent translations. Someone who already owns one of them probably would not need to purchase Kirmmse. However, anyone planning to buy a copy for the first time should certainly consider the Kirmmse translation, which is printed in a compact and beautiful hardcover edition that is reasonably priced. Kirmmse also provides an excellent and helpful introduction to the book, a reliable guide for the non-expert.

The Sickness Unto Death is one of the most important works in Kierkegaard’s corpus, for several reasons. The pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, is unlike earlier Kierkegaard pseudonyms. Many of the earlier pseudonyms, such as Johannes Climacus or Johannes de Silentio, are non-Christian characters who look at Christian faith from an outsider’s point of view, or embody clearly non-Christian perspectives, such as the pseudonymous “A” who is the author of the first volume of Either/Or. Anti-Climacus, however, is a Christian writer, who looks at the human self from a deeply Christian perspective. The pseudonym was added by Kierkegaard simply because Kierkegaard did not feel personally adequate to represent this “high” Christian view. Thus, Anti-Climacus is Kierkegaard’s creation, but also in some ways writes to Kierkegaard himself.

Anti-Climacus is clear that he writes from a Christian perspective. In the “Foreword” he says the book will strike many readers as “curious” (3). (All future quotations are from the Kirmmse translation.) The book will seem to such readers “too rigorous to be edifying, and too edifying to be strictly scholarly.” Anti-Climacus does not respond to the latter objection, though he clearly does not agree, but he says that if the book were not edifying, it would be a fault: “Indeed, from the Christian point of view, everything, everything ought to serve for edification.” Anti-Climacus thus claims that scholarly work that is Christian should not be “objective” in the sense of being indifferent; “Scholarliness of the sort that is not, ultimately, edifying is for that very precisely unchristian.”

Despite this, the first section of Sickness Unto Death provides a description of the human self and the ways it can fail to be authentic that is supposed to be psychologically accurate without presupposing Christianity. In this first half of the book Anti-Climacus tries to show that an authentic self must be grounded in some transcendent reality. The human self cannot invent itself but must seek to become the self it was created to be. Despair is the condition of the self that fails to become itself, failing to achieve the synthesis of possibility and necessity, eternity and temporality, that the self should become.

In Part II of the book this condition of despair is described in distinctively Christian terms: despair turns out to be sin, a rejection of God as God is revealed in Christ. Most human forms of despair are too “spiritless” even to be clearly forms of sin, though Anti-Climacus says that the sin in this case is to be spiritless, failing to be what God created humans to be. In rare cases humans reject God in a conscious way, a despair of “defiance” that can finally take the form of consciously rejecting God’s salvation in Christ.

Mis-readings of Sickness Unto Death are common, often because people project textbook misunderstandings of Kierkegaard onto the work. Part I, for example, which Anti-Climacus says is not distinctively Christian, still tries to show that God is necessary as the foundation of the self. God is, for example, the antidote both to the despair of possibility, in which people lose touch with actuality, and the despair of necessity, in which people lose possibility, either by becoming fatalists, or by allowing “the others” or “the public” to determine what the individual person should be. God is the antidote to both forms of despair. To recognize God is to recognize one’s own creatureliness and thus to accept the necessary element of one’s self. However, God is the one for “whom all things are possible,” and thus provides the antidote to fatalism. Since God creates every person as an individual, God also provides the basis for resisting “the crowd” and “the public” as one seeks to become one’s authentic self.

Readers often fail to recognize that Part I is not written from a distinctively Christian point of view because of the prominent role God plays in the text. They may have read Camus or others who think that Kierkegaard sees belief in God as unreasonable and only possible through a “leap of faith.” However, Kierkegaard does not think this at all. The “leap of faith” is only necessary to believe in Christ as the “God-man.” Kierkegaard does not think that human reason by itself can bring us to Christian faith. Rather, faith in Christ is a supernatural gift of God. Belief in God, however, is never seen as irrational. On the contrary, Kierkegaard thinks that humans who do not recognize God’s reality have failed to recognize that God is present to all who are seeking to achieve the Good that is “absolute.” The Sickness Unto Death thus helps us get beyond common mis-readings of Kierkegaard, and Kirmmse’s new translation is likewise an important contribution to that end.

C. Stephen Evans is Emeritus University Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Baylor University