The world houses people equally with natural things. When the world is thus treated as a gathering or even a gathering of natural things, it is not conceived as nature, and we do not understand that it is something that is in itself a holistic system, a system of regulations and arrangements, especially laws.

The separation of religion from the subject manifests itself in the emergence of an actual will. In the will I am an actual and free being, and I present myself against the subject as another, in order to represent it with myself by removing it from that state of separation.

The main characteristic here is subjectivity as a self-determining force - and this subjectivity and rational power that we have met before in the form of the one who has not yet been defined within himself and whose goal - as it appears in the realm of reality - is in this the most specific thing possible.

A companion piece to The Concept of Anxiety, this work continues Søren Kierkegaard's radical and comprehensive analysis of human nature in a spectrum of possibilities of existence. Present here is a remarkable combination of the insight of the poet and the contemplation of the philosopher.

In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard moves beyond anxiety on the mental-emotional level to the spiritual level, where--in contact with the eternal--anxiety becomes despair. Both anxiety and despair reflect the misrelation that arises in the self when the elements of the synthesis--the infinite and the finite--do not come into proper relation to each other. Despair is a deeper expression for anxiety and is a mark of the eternal, which is intended to penetrate temporal existence.

An examination of the Old Testament and later Jewish writings explores the evolution of the basic concepts of God, Man, history, sin, and repentance, and demonstrates the relevance of traditional beliefs in the contemporary world