Kierkegaard's Christian existentialism: Unresolved tensions in 'The Sickness Unto Death'

This work argues that elements of Christian doctrine, as they are articulated in Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death, cut against the very philosophical anthropology upon which they are built. Chapter 1 provides an exegesis of The Sickness Unto Death in order to equip the reader with an understanding of Kierkegaard's argument and the tone of his presentation that will enable him or her to both understand and have an independent perspective on the argument as it unfolds. The second chapter shows the central tensions in Sickness between the concepts of revelation and original sin and the analysis of selfhood in terms of consciousness and despair. Once the crux of the issue as it appears in Sickness has been laid out, other texts in Kierkegaard's authorship are considered for insight into potential solutions to these tensions. In this chapter it is also argued that no readily apparent interpretation of these tensions ameliorates them satisfactorily. The third chapter considers the work of those few Kierkegaard scholars whose work has touched upon potential tensions in The Sickness Unto Death in an attempt to see how others have assessed and resolved these difficulties. It is argued that none of these alternatives adequately addresses the tensions nor suffices to resolve them. In chapter 4 a new proposal for interpreting The Sickness Unto Death is offered. Here the controversial suggestion is made that this work, which has long been seen as Kierkegaard's finest and most explicit philosophical justification for Christianity, is actually only coherent when read as a non-Christian religious work. In chapter 4, this new proposed reading is discussed and Kierkegaard's concept of Religiousness A, is introduced and used as a model in this new interpretation. The contours of this God-centered, yet non-Christian, religiousness provide a valuable model for the reader as, in chapter 5, the underlying structure of Kierkegaard's theory of the self and argument for faith in Sickness are shown to rely only upon general, theistic concepts, and that, far from requiring Christianity in order to be complete, this theory is only complete without the Christian concepts of original sin and revelation.