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What is it about great books that make us feel as though, even on ours first read, we have read them before? They come to us already familiar. Their profundity seems to have bubbled over and dribbled down into the culture. Over time such books exert an oblique influence on our paradigms so that soon enough, to pick one example, we unwittingly assume Cartesian suppositions about the self without even having read Descartes�� Meditations. The Sickness unto Death seems to be one such “great book,�� for I can only explain its peculiar familiarity by its stature and influence. It has undoubtedly had a formative role to play in Sartre’s and Heidegger’s thinking, and the existentialists in general are heavily indebted to it. My interest in that particular drift of thought has in some sense initiated me into Kierkegaard’s own piercing way of writing, for it is the shared goal (perhaps the only shared goal) of existentialist writers to “awaken�� the reader into an awareness of their own individual, self-responsible existence.

It is interesting to read SUD from a position of acquaintance with those thinkers who have secularized Kierkegaard’s insights. I found that Kierkegaard’s explicit Christianity made the “existential�� dimension of the book more immediate and gripping. At the same time, though, I am able to see more clearly how Kierkegaard’s particular religious conviction frames his analysis of selfhood in a way that raises an important concern, namely, his exclusive focus on personal salvation. Where does good old neighbour-love enter in? It seems that something significant is missing from the picture, and if we are to be cautious we must decide for now that Kierkegaard’s myopic vision for individual salvation precludes a “prescriptive�� interpretation of the work as a whole. To be sure, it would not be too far off to call SUD a “self-help book,�� for the bent of the analysis is an elucidation of despair for the sake of the reader’s own “upbuilding.�� I wonder, though, how far such elucidation can go in the task of personal upbuilding?

Kierkegaard’s analysis also brings up a profound and deeply unsettling question without giving us any assurance of an answer (leaving us without assurance was indeed part of the point). It seems that the most compelling and important question to ask after reading SUD is, quite strangely: “Did God do the right thing in creating us? Is being a self worth it?�� Or, framed more religiously: “Is it worth it, to be separate from God?�� Being a “self�� is the condition of possibility for rejecting salvation, as Kierkegaard has shown so clearly �� it is even possible that a self can knowingly reject salvation (“there is no obscurity that could serve as a mitigating excuse��), which is far stranger and of more profound importance than the insight that we can unknowingly reject salvation. We are then inclined to ask, are these conditions of possibility worth it? Can we handle our selfhood, our radical freedom? Free will is a curse on those who misuse it, to be sure �� being a self is the possibility of real danger. But free will is a blessing on those who use it right, and so being a self is also the conditions of possibility for real joy. So, once again: is the risk worth it?

We must admit, there is no way to judge.

All we can say is that right now we are, in a carefully qualified sense, separate from God: “God, who constituted man as a relation, releases it from his hand, as it were.�� This means that we can relate ourselves to ourselves in such a way that we interpret ourselves as actually separate from God �� we thus interpret ourselves into our own damnation. Or we can do the opposite and interpret ourselves as grounded in God �� we can have faith, and in this way allow God to save us from damnation.

Yet this leads to a new question: how could damnation be predicated upon the inwardness/closedness of the self, which is the very thing which cuts off the hope for salvation? This is the greatest Catch-22 of all time! Dostoyevsky voices the same chilling complaint to God in Ivan Karamazov’s poem “The Grand Inquisitor.�� Humans, he says, are for the most part too weak for their freedom �� why then give it to them at all? They will be stuck in this Catch-22 forever. We cannot answer this question in any definite sense, and at best we can read SUD with a renewed appreciation of the depth of our choices.