Translator’s Note
The Concept of Anxiety (original title Begrebet Angest) was first published in June 1844. Kierkegaard had just turned thirty-one. The modest edition of 250 copies, half the number of the other pseudonymous works, was finally sold out eleven years later, whereupon a second edition of 500 copies was ordered and published in August 1855, just three months before Kierkegaard died at the age of forty-two. The second edition, on which the present translation is based, was unchanged except for some orthographic details and one serious blemish (corrected here) due to a typesetter mistaking a near pun for a double occurrence of the same word. It appears that Kierkegaard himself, who was otherwise occupied at the time and would soon fall fatally ill, made no changes to the text.
Five days earlier that same June in 1844, and only nine months after Fear and Trembling and Repetition, along with several “Edifying Discourses,” there also appeared a companion work already mentioned, Philosophical Crumbs (or Fragments). The two were composed in tandem, the latter with more attention to style and presumably written in less haste than Anxiety, which has been one of the least successfully translated of Kierkegaard’s works. Its tightly expressed thought, some stylistic casualness, and occasional syntactical idiosyncrasies make it no easy task for the English-language translator, who already has to deal with the incongruities in sentence construction between Danish and English. The first English-language translation, The Concept of Dread, was by Walter Lowrie, published 100 years after Begrebet Angest. It was one of the last of Lowrie’s twelve pathbreaking translations, all published within the amazingly short period of five years. Thirty-six years afterward came Reidar Thomte’s translation (in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson) in the formidably annotated Kierkegaard’s Writings edition, now as The Concept of Anxiety.
As The Concept of Dread this work had a troubled reception. Lowrie, Kierkegaard’s dedicated salesman, admitted that “a great many parsons, especially in America, if they were to become acquainted with [Kierkegaard], would indignantly reject him.” Reviewers were by no means as inclined as Lowrie to embrace Kierkegaard. One reviewer, in the American Journal of Sociology, wrote that the “enthusiastic Kierkegaardians of our day do not, obviously, base their allegiance in [the] teachings of the master.” Another was even more dismissive, beginning with the words: “This book is interesting to the psychiatrist mainly because it inadvertently presents strong evidence that the writer is a psychiatric case.” To the extent that Kierkegaard might well agree, that of course is in fact a recommendation.
The two earlier translations differ considerably in style, the second extinguishing the energetic effusiveness which presented Kierkegaard with a flourish that was in essence Lowrie’s own, and keeping more faithfully to the sometimes epigrammatic perfunctoriness of much of the original. For etymological reasons, and because the work is now more familiar under that title, the new translation presented here retains “Anxiety” rather than “Dread.” It helps also to make the link, or contrast, with psychiatric disorders with the same name (or “Angst”) more evident. The tone of the original is preserved as far as possible while at the same time attention has been paid to making the translation read and sound as naturally in English as possible. Some restrictions have to be upheld in order not to lose too much of the measure of the original (Kierkegaard’s Danish translates much more readily into German than into English). The widespread use of abstract nouns is a case in point. I have nevertheless tried to avoid and disambiguate the many occurrences of variants of the multipurpose “Bestemmelse” (in German “Bestimmung”) usually translated as “determinant” and in related uses, as “qualified” and sometimes “category.” Readers should note that the word “speculation” refers to either of two “home” disciplines within the tradition that has Absolute Spirit as its goal. These were respectively “speculative philosophy” and “speculative theology,” the latter concerned with questions within “dogmatics,” such as the role of revelation, and thus matters not embraced by Kierkegaard’s psychology, while the former might include speculation about the status of dogmatics and the range of topics proper to it. Speculative philosophy is what Kierkegaard attacks.
Some politically sensitive readers may be disturbed by the occasional use of “man” as a translation of the genderless “Mennesket” (German Mensch). But to avoid the not altogether accurate rendering as “person” and the clumsiness of “human being,” “man” occurs here in the relevant and easily identified standard English contexts. On the other hand, with the same sensitivity in mind, I have on occasion followed the Danish in treating “individual” (Individet) as a gender-neutral noun. As for “hereditary sin,” this is preferred to “original sin” because it is closer to the Danish “Arvesynden,” in which the notion of inheritance is explicit rather than implied.
Retranslators always have the advantage over their predecessors of being able to tackle the problems of translation in new ways. Unless very remiss they can also leave fewer literal mistakes. In some parts of the text it is hard to improve on Lowrie and also unwise to spend too much time trying. In several instances readers will find that both Thomte and I have either come to the same result or chosen to let Lowrie’s version stand, particularly where Kierkegaard is at his most succinct. In translation there is no point in change for the sake of novelty. That these translations nevertheless differ overall, not just in detail but also in style, is as it should be. Multiple translation only goes to make it quite evident that any translation is nothing but a mock-up of the original, a reconcoction, and certainly not that impossibility, its reincarnation in an alternative language.
Up to the last moment Kierkegaard intended to publish Begrebet Angest under his own name. Why he changed his mind is not recorded, but a journal entry in connection with Anxiety from near the time of publication claims “a poetic relationship to my works, which is why I am a pseudonym.” The reason could be that he saw his writer’s role as involving a kind of disengagement from his own person, which would of course justify almost any writer in adopting a pseudonym. But of all his pseudonyms, and just slightly behind Either/Or’s ironic “Victor Eremita” (Triumphant Recluse), Anxiety’s “Vigilius Haufniensis” (The Watchful Copenhagener) comes closest to describing Kierkegaard as he saw himself, as a rather special kind of writer, and one who, when later describing “how it went,” said: “I presented the problem facing the whole human race: equality between man and man. I acted it out in Copenhagen. That is something else than writing a few words about it; I expressed it approximately with my life.”
The Concept of Anxiety is dedicated to Poul M. Møller, Kierkegaard’s twenty-year-older friend and closest mentor who died six years before the work was published. A poet as well as philosopher, Møller had spent time as ship’s chaplain on a China trader before becoming first a schoolteacher and then for two years professor of philosophy at the newly founded university in Oslo. He translated part of Homer’s Odyssey, inspired Kierkegaard’s interest in Socrates, and wrote commentaries on Aristotle. The expression “Joy over Denmark” is the title given to a poem Møller wrote while far from home on the China seas.