Soren Kierkegaard

in his own name and to use his academic title,magister artium .Nor is the
work without certain scholarly ambitions: It is composed in numbered sec-
tions, thirteen in all; these, in turn, are distributed among five chapters, each
titled “Caput,” which is Latin for “chapter.” In addition to this is the little
“On” in the title “On the Concept of Anxiety,” which remained in the
manuscript during the transition from school notebook to fair copy and
which leads us to think spontaneously of Kierkegaard’s university disserta-
tion,On the Concept of Irony, to which a work on anxiety, which is just
as ambiguous as irony, would form a sort of counterpart .At some point
Kierkegaard changed the original title, however, and using a pencil he
crossed out the little “On,” so that the title was now simply “The Concept
of Anxiety.” On the same occasion he cut the title page in half, so that
only the title and the subtitle remained, while “S. Kierkegaard / M.A.”
disappeared and was replaced by the pseudonym “Vigilius Haufniensis.”
Right at the edge, where the paper has been cut, a little “by” reveals that
an intervention has taken place .In similar fashion, he crossed out the
“S .K .” he had originally written under an epigram about Socrates and
Hamann on the reverse side of the title page .Both changes were apparently
made a few days before the manuscript was sent to the printer’s .The work
proceeded rapidly, and evidence of haste can be detected in a couple of
footnotes Kierkegaard failed to revise so as to take into account the pseud-
onym Vigilius Haufniensis, who thus comes to speak with a strange direct-
ness about the lectures by Schelling that Kierkegaard had attended in Berlin
in 1841 and 1842 .No less striking, however, is the fact that the exuberant
dedication to Poul Martin Møller remained in its original place—because
it is very doubtful that Vigilius Haufniensis had ever known him! Thus, in
its own dry, factual manner the manuscript constitutes an ironic commen-
tary on the often quite speculative reflections of later generations concern-
ing the problem of pseudonymity in Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard, however, does not seem ever to have bothered about the
curious discrepancy between the work’s pseudonymous publication and its
personal dedication, and immediately after the book appeared he made a
journal entry in which he offered reassurances, both to himself and to pos-
terity: “I always stand in an altogether poetic relation to my works; therefore
I am pseudonymous .Whenever a book develops something, the appro-
priate individuality is delineated .Now Vigilius Haufniensis is delineating a
number of these, but I have also placed a sketch of him in the book.” This
“sketch” (behind which one more than glimpses features of Kierkegaard
himself) is a refreshing portrait of the psychologist in the days before he
donned his white laboratory coat and his professional reading glasses: “Just
as the psychological observer ought to be nimbler than a tight-rope dancer