Chapter 13 - Accountability to God in The Sickness unto Death

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.