Sickness Unto Death Notes, Preface

Kierkegaard spent his career trying to communicate one main point: Christianity is not primarily a theory or an idea or even a way of life; it is an existential communication between the God-man Christ and the individual man. This means you.

The man who approaches Christianity as a matter of merely academic interest may be correct according to the canons of the academy, but he is involved necessarily in what Kierkegaard would call "subjective falsehood." He has mistaken himself for someone to whom the challenge of Christ has not been directed, or at least as someone to whom the challenge of Christ may be subordinated to the abstract, intellectual pursuit of truth. The academic calling is taken as a higher calling than the call of Christ, as though the intellectual demands of the academic are self-evidently the highest demand that can possibly be.

But Christ has directed his call to discipleship to intellectuals as well as common men. This is the source of the "anxious concern" that characterizes the true Christian intellectual, or even an intellectual who , though not a Christian, recognizes that Christianity is a possibility for him. Whether Christianity is immediately taken to be objectively true is beside the point. Kierkegaard's point relates to our existence as individuals with respect to the possibility that Christ is indeed the Son of God. If He is not, then Christ has no meaning and places no demands on me now or in the future; if He is, then He has infinite meaning for me and places demands on me now, not at some far off time in the future when my intellectual investigation of Christianity reaches a satisfactory completion. The intellectual who understands his subjective relationship to the possible truth of Christianity will naturally feel anxiety with respect to the predicament in which it puts him.

This predicament is not an artificial creation of Kierkegaard or radically out of character with the rest of existence. For example, the man who is told the building he is in is on fire is in a mundane, less significant form of the predicament. He will leave the building because of the subjective truth of his relationship to the possible objective truth that the building is on fire. Were he not in this particular building, he could take the proposal that it is on fire as one for leisurely academic study. He could take as long as he likes, let the evidence accumulate, and render a judgment only when he finds a scientifically defensible conclusion can be made. The man in the building has no such luxury; more significant to him than the actual objective state of the building is his subjective relationship to the possibility that it is on fire. The dire consequences that would follow were the building to actually be on fire and he inside it dictate his course of action. He leaves off idle speculation about the building and gets up and leaves it.

Kierkegaard's point is that, with respect to Christianity, we are all like the man in the (possibly) burning building. There is no place in existence "outside the building" from which a man may investigate Christianity with academic indifference, as though its flames could not possibly touch him. The man who takes this approach to Christianity, whatever his merits as an objective scholar, has already made a far more serious subjective mistake with respect to Christianity.

Kierkegaard is not saying that this "subjective logic" should compel all reasonable men to become Christians. He viewed his career as merely a corrective to the notion that Christianity can legitimately be approaches in an attitude of academic detachment. Any consideration of Christianity that grasps its essential nature, whatever the ultimate objective truth of Christianity, will involve some anxiety and "fear and trembling" on the part of the investigator.

When Kierkegaard writes in an "edifying" mode, he writes for the "man in the burning building," not for the disinterested, leisurely academic. Thus the Sickness Unto Death is not written in the abstract, subjectively indifferent form we expect of academic discourse, but in a form that reflects the existential predicament in which Christianity places all men. Since with respect to Christ, we are all in the possibly burning building, "From the Christian point of view everything, absolutely everything, should serve for edification." Therefore, with respect to the opinion that the Sickness Unto Death is "too edifying" to be strictly scientific, Kierkegaard "has no opinion," for such an opinion can only be made from the place of academic disinterest, just the place Kierkegaard denies is available for the investigator aware of subjective truth. By refusing himself to have such a "scientific opinion", Kierkegaard signals to the reader that he has taken his own writing subjectively and to heart.