Notes
Translator’s Introduction
.Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus (Tübingen, 1800); System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997).
.Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), §80, p. 51.
.Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. W. Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), p. 58.
.Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks (hereinafter KJN), ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), vol. 2, JJ:511.
.Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 83 (Great Ideas edition, 2005, p. 63).
.Søren Kierkegaard Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, trans. M. G. Piety, Intro. Edward F. Mooney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 173.
.Kierkegaard’s Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin Books, 1996), pp. 185–86.
.The Sickness unto Death, a sequel to The Concept of Anxiety at a later time when Kierkegaard had become an open defender of his radical Christianity, suggests that the stress we place on finite achievement, fortune, fame, and respectability, a stress so great that we feel ruined when misfortune or disability intervenes, signals a “despair over ourselves.” This is not despair at not having become Caesar, it is the despair manifested in wanting to become Caesar in the first place, that of replacing an infinite with a finite wish (The Sickness unto Death, trans. Alastair Hannay [London: Penguin Books, 1989], p. 49 [Great Ideas edition, 2008, p. 17]).
.Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (hereinafter SKS), ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 2003), vol. 20 NB:123; Kierkegaard’s Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. Hannay, p. 254.
.Søren Kierkegaard Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, trans. Piety, p. 172.
Translator’s Note
.For details of the preparation of the text and its publication I have drawn on the account given in SKS, vol. K(ommentarbind)4, pp. 317–39.
.Walter Lowrie, “How Kierkegaard Got into English,” in A Short Life of Kierkegaard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013 [1942]), p. 279.
.Ellsworth Faris, American Journal of Sociology 50 (1945): 401.
.Abraham Myerson, MD, The American Journal of Psychiatry 1945 (101): 839.
.KJN 1, JJ:227 (1844).
.KJN 5, NB 10:29 (1849) (translation altered); Kierkegaard’s Papers and Journals: A Selection, p. 365.
Preface
.An alternative preface originally intended for this work appeared as “Preface No. 7” in Prefaces, published in the same month as The Concept of Anxiety and Philosophical Crumbs. Kierkegaard may have dropped it because of its unduly polemical remarks on local writers (see the commentary volume K4 in SKS, p. 552). That Preface says that, instead of trying to understand all men, he has chosen what people may regard as a “narrow and foolish aim,” namely to understand himself, a task in which progress is likely to be “slower” (SKS 4, pp. 501–2).
.A reference to a proposed annual publication designed by its editor and publisher J. L. Heiberg to appear at the beginning of the year as a “New Year’s present.” The foremost cultural personality in Copenhagen at the time, Heiberg was writer, critic, editor, and also effective popularizer of Hegel, whose lectures he had attended. Famous for his vaudevilles modeled on the French theater, Heiberg was married to Denmark’s most celebrated actress Johanne Louise Pätges, whom Kierkegaard much admired and was the subject of his “The Crisis and a Crisis in an Actress’s Life” from 1847. In 1846 Heiberg became director of the Royal Theater in Copenhagen. Largely due to Heiberg’s somewhat disdainful reviews of his publications, Kierkegaard rarely passed up an opportunity to belittle this gifted man, whose satirical gifts were equal to his own. Heiberg’s comedy “A Soul after Death” (1841) is thought to have prompted the title of Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death (1849).
.Latin, “let it be printed,” the censor’s permission (still required of religious works in Catholicism) before publication. In Erasmus Montanus or Erasmus Berg, a comedy by the Norwegian-Danish writer Ludwig Holberg (1684–1754). The expression is understood by one character to refer to a person.
Introduction
.A reference to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic), where “Actuality [Wirklichkeit]” is in fact the topic of the second book’s third section, its second chapter in particular.
.A reference to Hegelians who take faith to be in part an immediate relation to God that is to be replaced by speculative knowledge (see Translator’s Introduction).
.Hegel’s logic begins with pure being or “indeterminate immediacy” (Science of Logic, ch.1, §1).
.The reference is to local Danish writers such as A. P. Adler, who published popularized versions of Hegel (1770–1831) and particularly of his “speculative” logic.
.An ideal of Absolute or Transcendental ldealism most characteristically presented in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling’s System des transzendentalen Idealismus (Tübingen 1800); System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath. On Schelling (1775–1854) see Translator’s Introduction.
.Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) held that experience obeys its own object-giving laws and that therefore anything that lies beyond experience (“things in themselves”) cannot be known. Just as the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) motivated Kant’s arrival at laws guaranteeing the objective reference of experience, so Kant provoked Schelling and Hegel into finding a way to bring things-in-themselves within cognitive range.
.The phrase “Method and Manifestation” may be due to A. P. Adler’s “propaedeutic” writing on Hegel.
.Usually associated with the Hegelian dialectic in which the negation of one notion produces its opposite and the resulting opposition or “contradiction” between them is then overcome by virtue of reason’s coming upon a more encompassing notion that contains elements of both, as, for example, in the case of necessity and freedom, where true freedom will not be abstract and arbitrary but situated and dependent. As in much of Hegel and Schelling, the terminology is largely due to Kant.
.The proper doctrine of the Word, as announced in the first words of the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Greek for “word” is λόγοϛ from which the term “logic” is derived.
.Ethics in Protestant theology has traditionally to do with the Christian way of life and dogmatics with the content of Christian faith.
.Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung (Danish ophævelse), meaning “abrogate” or “abolish,” but in Hegel with the special sense as in note 8 of preserving what is “annulled” or “nullified” in a higher, more encompassing notion. See Hegel’s Science of Logic, vol. 1, part 2, ch. 3.
.Science of Logic, vol. 7, bk. 7, §§ 1, II B.
.Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (1766–1817), the famous Mme de Staël, who wrote to this effect in Über Deutschland (On Germany).
.That Hegelian philosophy, often referred to as the System, was on its way to completion, if not already complete in principle, is something Kierkegaard constantly ridicules.
.“Mood” is one of many notions that Kierkegaard will have found in his reading of the German Hegelian Karl Rosenkranz, Psychologie oder die Wissenschaft vom subjektiven Geist [Psychology or the science of subjective spirit] (Königsberg, 1837).
.Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 1, ch. 8.
.Anaximander (c. 610–c. 546 BC), a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher now considered by many the forerunner of scientific thinking and noted for his idea that ultimate reality is apeiron (unlimited, infinite, indefinite). He introduces the unexplained notion of a vortex motion to account for the separation of heavier from lighter elements.
.Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834) was Romanticism’s leading theologian and had many followers in Copenhagen, including Kierkegaard’s philosophy teacher, F. C. S. Sibbern, before the overwhelming influence of Hegel made itself felt among younger thinkers.
.Concupiscence (Latin, concupisco: strive after), originally any desire of the soul for the good, but in wider use a desire of the lower appetites.
.In his Metaphysics Aristotle used this term for philosophy concerned with first causes and ultimate principles.
.A reference to the German mathematician and rationalist philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), Les principes de la Philosophie ou la Monadologie (Monadology; c. 1713).
.When Syracuse was taken by the Romans (212 BC), Archimedes, the most famous of ancient mathematicians and natural philosophers, was killed while concentrating on a mathematical problem.
Chapter I
.Also known as covenant theology: a framework in Calvinism from the seventeenth century that interprets the Bible (from creation to consummation) under the concepts of works, grace, and redemption. Before the Fall there is covenant of nature (innocence) in which Adam goes proxy for humankind, but after that Fall this is no longer within that covenant and Christ then becomes a requirement of fulfillment.
.The Smalcald Articles: Martin Luther’s summary of Lutheran doctrine written in 1537 for an ecumenical council of the Church.
.Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullian(us) (c. AD 160–230). Born in Carthage, North Africa, and son of a Roman centurion, Tertullian was one of the earliest Church Fathers and a fierce opponent of worldiness in the Church as also of speculation in religious matters.
.St. Augustine (Augustinus Aurelius), the Church Father, born AD 354 in Numidia, educated at Carthage, and famous for his Confessions and De Civitate Dei. He died when bishop of Hippo, in 430, when the city was besieged by Vandals.
.Abbreviation of Apologia Augustinae Confessionis (really Apologia Confessionis Augustanae) by the German reformer, and close colleague of Luther, Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560).
.Formula Concordiae (Formula of Concord; 1577) is the final authoritative statement of Lutheran faith (its creed), and was designed to heal a split in the early days of the Lutheran Church.
.Uncompromising laws named after Dracon, the seventh-century BC Athenian legislator who established a written code of laws (said to be written in blood rather than ink) in which death was the penalty for almost every transgression. His laws fell into disuse after Solon’s legislation (594 BC).
.Pelagianism: the Pelagian heresy, due to Pelagius (c. 354–425), possibly an inhabitant of Britain or Ireland, to the effect that human nature is unaffected by the belief in hereditary sin and that the mortal will is able to choose good or evil without divine aid. Socinianism: named after Fausto Sozzini (1539–1604), it denies Christ’s full deity and hence the Trinity, hereditary sin, and the inability of self-conversion. Versions are found today in Unitarians and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Philanthropic singular: Johann Bernhard Basedow (1724–1790), educational reformer, founded the progressive Philanthropinum school in Dessau. Kierkegaard would perhaps know of him through Basedow’s appointment in the previous midcentury to the progressive Sorø Academy in Denmark, funded by Ludwig Holberg (see Preface, note 3). Basedow had been a popular teacher in religion and literature.
.In J. L. Heiberg’s vaudeville Recensten og Dyret (The critic and the beast), a sixty-year-old law student, Trop, says that it is at least something that he can offer proof of having almost passed the Latin exam.
.Boys at the Royal Charity School.
.Ethical rigorism is usually associated with Kant and the familiar example he draws from his “categorical imperative,” that it is wrong to lie in whatever circumstances. In Church history it goes back to ascetic movements, some of them regarded as heresies, such as the Montanism espoused by Tertullian himself (see note 3, above) in his later years.
.The Danish refers to a clip used to close off a sausage, calling to mind the Danish expression at koge suppe paa en pølsepind (to cook sausage from a sausage pin). A stingy woman is said to have offered to make soup from such a clip for a wanderer, while the latter offers richer suggestions including the sausage, from which the sense of “spinning a long yarn” is derived.
.Leonhard Usteri (1799–1833), a Swiss Protestant theologian and educator strongly influenced by Schleiermacher. The reference is to Usteri’s Entwicklung des Paulinischen Lehrbegriffe in seinem Verhältnisse zur biblischen Dogmatik des Neuen Testamentes. Ein exegetisch-dogmatischer Versuch (Development of the Pauline concept of teaching in its relation to the New Testament’s scriptural dogmatics), Zürich 1824, a work that Kierkegaard possessed.
.Cambyses, second king of Persia, who reigned from 529–522 BC, in order to overcome the strong defense of the Egyptian city of Plurion in 525, placed before it examples of species of animals they considered holy, thus causing its defenders to stop using their catapult machines.
.It is tempting but probably incorrect to translate “alle katholsk-fortjenstlige Phantasterier” as “all Catholic self-serving whimsies,” independently of a reference to Adam’s alleged superior merit.
.The other in this case is not another person or self, but simply other.
.In a draft for this passage Kierkegaard writes that, as far as he knows, scientists have concluded that animals are not anxious, only afraid of what they meet. The sense in which they are not anxious is captured in a familiar poem by the Scottish poet Robert Burns “To a Mouse”: “Still thou art blest, compar’d wi me! / The present only toucheth thee: / But och! I backward cast my e’e, / On prospects drear! / An forward, tho’ I canna see, / I guess an fear!” From what was said in the Translator’s Introduction it is clear that the anxiety for things absent denied to the mouse is still not the topic of the present work.
.The Danish expressions may be more natural than these English language near-equivalents.
.The commentators in SKS, K4 (p. 416) suggest that Gabriel was the saint that Kierkegaard had in mind. It is true that Michael’s “mission” (as protector of the Jews) was of a more military manner than the context suggests here.
.Die kluge Else (Wise Else): a tale from the folklore collected by the Brothers Grimm.
.Salomon Soldin, a bookseller in Copenhagen about whom such stories were rife.
Chapter II
.In Chapter IV, §2.
.In §2 (B) of the present chapter.
.In a journal entry referred to in the Translator’s Note (note 5) regarding the pseudonym, Kiekegaard writes: “The sketch I dashed off of an observer in The Concept of Anxiety will probably upset some people. However, it does belong there and is a kind of watermark in the work . . . Simultaneously with the book’s development of some themes, the corresponding individuality is drawn. Now Vigilius Hauf. draws several, but in the book I have dashed off a sketch of him in addition” (KJN 2, JJ:227).
.Chapter IV, “Sin’s Anxiety or Anxiety as the Outcome of Sin in the Single Individual.”
.Eighteenth-century rationalist philosophers (notably Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza) claimed that the acquisition of knowledge, including that of religious truths, was accessible to unaided though properly used reason.
.Franz Xavier von Baader (1765–1841), German Roman Catholic philosopher, also a trained engineer who spent some years in England. Finding the philosophical atmosphere there not to his taste, he had turned to Schelling and wrote in an aphoristic style thoughts that he also owed to the mystic Jakob Boehme (1575–1624).
.Pelagianism. See Chapter I, note 8.
.In Ludwig Holberg’s comedy Erasmus Montanus or Rasmus Berg, Hieronymus’s daughter writes to Erasmus that her father refuses to give her away to him until he renounces his belief in the roundness of the earth.
.Ganymede, perhaps less generally heard of than these other figures in Greek mythology, was a beautiful young Trojan hero abducted by Zeus to be a cup-bearer in Olympus.
.For Scham (German, “shame”).
.Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829), a central figure in the German Romantic movement and responsible for converting the notion of irony as a mere figure of speech into an entire literary or quasi-philosophical perspective that names Socrates among its antecedents and has Kierkegaard among its main exponents. The reference is to Schlegel’s “Geschichte des Zauberers Merlin” (History of the Magician Merlin).
.Xenophon (b. c. 444 BC): Greek historian, mercenary, and philosopher. Allegedly a student of Socrates’s, to whom it is also said he owed his life at the battle of Delium (424). His account of Socrates in Memorabilia, defending Socrates against corrupting the Athenian youth, is usually regarded as reliable.
.One at variance with current scientific classifications. An example in Kierkegaard’s time was an unusually large tadpole that was considered a hybrid between a frog and a salamander that developed into a fish.
.In theology “pneumatics” (Greek pneuma—spirit, breath, wind) refers to doctrine or issues concerning the soul or spirit.
.“Know yourself!” The inscription on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece.
Chapter III
.Member of ancient Greek sect who practiced gazing at the navel as a means of inducing hypnotic reverie.
.Danish Kaffémølle: lit. coffee grinder, a term used for a simple two-wheeled wagon typical of the countryside, while the chosen translation here refers to an old-fashioned two-wheeled chaise or else any old-fashioned and worn-out vehicle.
.From Frithiofs Saga, a poem cycle by the Swedish writer Esaias Tegnér from 1825.
.In Plato’s Phaido Socrates tries to show that the soul is immortal through the notion of learning. Kierkegaard uses this notion as a contrast to his own (one could say Christian existentialist) notion that truth is in the making and thus in the future rather than in a retrievable past.
.Socrates and Hamann (cf. the epigraph to Anxiety and Translator’s Introduction).
.The electrical basis of nerve impulses and stimulation of muscles was demonstrated with a frog in 1789 by the Italian scientist and physician Luigi Galvani (1737–98), to whom the verb “galvanize” in its everyday and technical or scientific uses is due.
.Marengo in northern Italy where in 1800 the French forces under Napoleon defeated the Austrians prior to Napoleon’s assuming the position of First Consul in Paris.
.The location in 1805 of one of Napoleon’s greatest victories, this time over combined Russian and Austrian forces.
.A quotation from Plutarch (c. AD 46–c. 120). See Plutarch’s Lives, vol. 2 (London: Dent/New York: E. P. Dutton, 1910), p. 559.
.Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838), French diplomatist sometimes thought to be the most skilled in history but also suspected of treason to all the movements over which he had influence. He left the Catholic Church after being ordained.
.Carpocrates was a second-century BC Alexandrian Gnostic who held that one could only be free from all sin by first trying everything including the sins.
.Pamphilius of Caesarea, a fourth-century biblical scholar known for his generosity as well as his wealth and his death by torture.
.The English poet Edward Young (1681–1765): “Where Nature’s end of language is declined / and men talk only to conceal their mind” (Night Thoughts).
.Hegel divides concepts into those that are immediately derivable from experience and those that are formed by a reflection that reaches their essence.
Chapter IV
.Renderings in Greek, Latin, and French of the notion of “idle argument” or “lazy reasoning” attributed by the Roman orator Cicero (106–43 BC) to the Greek Stoic philosopher Chrysippus (c. 280–c. 207 BC) and recorded also in Leibniz’s Theodicy, a work to which Kierkegaard frequently refers.
.In the last scene of Act 2 of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni.
.Sometimes called the “doodlebug” due to the doodling trails it leaves while looking for a place to make its trap.
.Probably a reference to Schelling’s System des transcendentalen Idealismus (see Introduction, note 5).
.Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 4, scene 6, Gloucester to Lear: “O ruin’d piece of nature! This great world / Shall so wear out to nought.” Kierkegaard translates as usual from the German translation by A. W. Schlegel and I. Tieck, Shakespeare’s dramatische Werke, Berlin, 1839–41.
.In ancient Greece Scythia was an indeterminate area north of the Black Sea inhabited by nomad peoples who were expert in cavalry exercises and archery.
.“in terms of the idea”: looked at from the standpoint of the concept.
.Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), “elder” in relation to his son the “younger” Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1797–1879) whom Kierkegaard also read. The comment here is due to a reference made by Kierkegaard’s contemporary and in many ways rival, the Danish theologian, moral philosopher, and later Danish primate Hans Lassen Martensen (1808–84).
.Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801), Swiss Protestant pastor and founder of physiognomics.
.It seems that Augustine did not in fact recommend the death penalty, although this is thought to be true of Tertullian.
.E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), an all-round German Romantic writer of horror and fantasy, composer, and jurist.
.Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1623), and Henry V as Prince of Wales, in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, parts 1 and 2 (1597–98).
.Accepting the sacraments in communion.
.The expression in Danish translates as “out with the language [ud med Sproget!].”
.A Danish saying. Also “Every devil reigns in his time, but Our Lord reigns always.”
.From a Danish saying to the effect that fools have their hearts on their tongues and the wise their tongues in their hearts.
.Titus Flavius Domitian(us) (51–96), a Roman Emperor with totalitarian tendencies; Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), uncompromising Protestant Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England; Fernando Alvarez de Toledo Alba (1508–82), despotic Spanish general represented in Goethe’s Egmont; the head of the Jesuit Order was known as a Jesuit general.
.A device formerly made of wickerwork that helps children to learn to walk while supported; similar in principle to a “walker.”
.In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act I, scene 2: “And whatsoever shall hap to-night, / Give it an understanding, but no tongue.” Here from Schlegel and Tieck’s German translation.
.The Romantic poets George Gordon (Lord) Byron (1788–1824) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822).
.August Bournonville (1805–79), world famous choreographer, solo dancer, and mimer at the Royal Danish Ballet.
.In legend a fairy that looks full bodied en face but proves hollow as a “kneading trough” from behind.
.Carl Michael Bellman (1740–95), Swedish poet and songwriter, composer, and performer.
.Cf. F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände (1809), translated by Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt as Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Freedom (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007).
.Alexandre Jean Baptiste Benjamin Parent-Duchatelet, a French physician and hygienist mentioned in Rosenkranz’s Psychologie oder die Wissenschaft vom subjektiven Geist (Königsberg, 1837).
.A likely reference to J. G. Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre. Cf. Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (1794/95; 2nd ed., 1802). Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath. In Fichte: Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), ed. Peter Heath and John Lachs (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970); 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
.Medusa, one of three fearsome maidens known as Gorgons, the others being Stheno and Euryale. Their heads were covered in serpents instead of hair, although in Medusa’s case only after Athena had punished her in this way for using one of her temples to conceive Chrysaor and Pegasus. All who looked at her head were turned to stone.
.Perhaps Bruno Bauer (1809–82) in his two volume Kritikk der evangenlischen Geschichte der Synoptiker (Critique of the Evangelical history of the Synoptics [the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John]; Leipzig 1841–42).
.Kierkegaard quotes directly from Schlegel and Tieck’s translation, which is in this case quite direct. The English version provided here is from an accredited edition of Shakespeare.
.Karl Rosenkranz, Psychologie oder die Wissenschaft vom subjektiven Geist (Königsberg, 1837).
.Albertus Magnus (1193–1220), German theologian and philosopher in Paris and Cologne who wrote extensively on Aristotle.
.J. G. Fichte’s theory that the conscious subject is the sole ground for the explanation of all experience and that consciousness of any object of experience is implicitly consciousness directed toward itself as origin.
.A reference to an essay on the possibility of proving immortality by Poul Martin Møller, Anxiety’s dedicatee (see Translator’s Introduction).
.“Lethe” is a word which in Ancient Greek, like the Latin “oblivio,” means “forgetfulness.” It was the name given to the river of oblivion in the lower world from which the shades drank in order to lose their memory of the past.
Chapter V
.Jakob L. K. Grimm and Wilhelm K. Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen [Children’s and Household Tales], vol. 1, no. 4.
.This is where, in preparing the second edition, the typesetter mistook a near pun for a double occurrence of the same word. See Translator’s Introduction.
.Governance (Danish Styrelse): God’s governance, a notion allied to that of Providence and sometimes translated “Guidance.”
.Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki (1726–1801), a Polish German painter and printmaker. The picture in question appears as an illustration in a work by Lavater (Physiognomische Fragmente, vol. 4). See Chapter IV, note 9.
.Danish Hexebrev, a set of picture parts of animals and people that that can be “magically” combined in different ways.
.In Plato’s dialogue Cratylus, 428d.