The Long Journey to Oneself: The Existential Import of The Sickness unto Death

Although signed pseudonymously, The Sickness unto Death is taken to reflect Kierkegaard’s authorized view of the value and content of the religious life. This chapter argues that the ideal of religiosity that Kierkegaard develops it in this text is primarily existential, namely focused on the believer’s way of living in the world. To demonstrate this, a detailed analysis of Kierkegaard’s conception of selfhood is presented. Distinguishing between “being a self” and “becoming the self that one is intended by God to be,” it is shown how the latter is achieved by way of living correctly. While one’s quality of selfhood – the quality that makes one a self, an individual – is possessed in a state of potential, the actualization of this potential is a function of one’s worldly existence. There is therefore a tight connection between unfulfilled life, unfulfilled self, and unfulfilled relationship with God. And on the other hand, one “rests transparently” in God (in Kierkegaard’s words), when one becomes the self that God intends one to be. And we become who God intends us to be by living correctly.