Relation To Other Works
The Sickness Unto Death has strong existentialist themes. For example, the concept of the finite and infinite parts of the human self translate to the concepts of 'facticity' and 'transcendence' in Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Kierkegaard's thesis is, of course, in other ways profoundly different from Sartre, most obviously because of Kierkegaard's belief that only religious faith can save the soul from Despair. This particular brand of existentialism is often called Christian existentialism.
Some have suggested that the opening of the book is an elaborate parody of the oftentimes bafflingly cryptic philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Hegel; however, some scholars, such as Gregor Malantschuk, have suggested otherwise (Armed Neutrality and An Open Letter, Simon and Schuster, 1969, pp. 65–6 and n. 7 on pp. 165–6).
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