Anxiety as the Disclosement of Care

         The experience of moods or attunements speaks of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. Although Heidegger had examined various moods such as fear, he focused on the analysis of anxiety. This is to pave the ground for his analysis of Dasein’s being, which he baptizes with the name Sorge [Care]. Heidegger believes that anxiety is the key mood for the total disclosure of human existence. More specifically, anxiety reveals that man’s very being is primarily characterized by what Heidegger calls Care.

In Heideggerian analysis of anxiety, fear was lucidly distinguished from anxiety. Fear has an object, thus fear is always a fear of something. “Fear is directed toward something definite, it focuses on detail” (Safranski, p.152). In other words, fear is marked by specifity, wherein one is afraid of being harmed in some specific respect by something that approaches in some specific way, from some specific sector of its environment. Hence one can readily point to the thing that provokes fear, identify why it fears it, and locate its point of origin. 

In contradistinction to fear, Heidegger analyzed anxiety, as “the shadowy queen of all moods, is vague and as boundless as the world. The ‘of what’ of anxiety is ‘the world as such’” (Safranski, p. 152). Anxiety is not being anxious of something rather it is being anxious to the totality of the world. Anxiety is not provoked by anything specific and it does not threaten Dasein in a specific way. “It [anxiety] is the basic mood overtaking a man when he first comes to realize the contingency of that-which-is [world] as such and in its totality, as well as its complete otherness from being” (James Collins, The Existentialists: A Critical Study, p.198). Anxiety is the fear of the nothing. It is the fear of ‘I-know-not-what’. Thus, Heidegger emphasizes that the experience of anxiety is rare. 

 

As being-in-the-world Dasein finds its home in the world to the point that it finds comfort in its Dasein-with [others]. In its everydayness, Dasein is absorbed in the world. It falls to the snare of the ‘they’ [Das-man], thus forgetting its ownmost possibility, its potentiality-for-Being. Due to the absorption of Dasein in the ‘they’, Heidegger maintains the position that the turning away from falling prey is only possible through the encounter of anxiety.

In the face of anxiety no worldly entity is of importance. That is to say, one can neither point to any worldly being as the source of its anxiety, nor to any such entity as a potential source of comfort. By extension, the world itself ceases to be relevant. This is not to suggest that the world suddenly disappears. Rather it is to suggest that in anxiety the world reveals itself as an indifferent place for Dasein. Thus, Dasein becomes uncanny. Heidegger explains:

In that in the face of anxiety of which one has anxiety, the ‘it is nothing and nowhere’ becomes manifest. The obstinacy of the ‘nothing and nowhere within-the-world’ means as a phenomenon that the world as such is that in the face of which one has anxiety. The utter insignificance which makes itself known in the ‘nothing and nowhere’, does not signify that the world is absent, but tells us that entities within-the-world are of so little importance in themselves that on the basis of this insignificance of what is within-the-world, the world in its worldhood is all that still obtrudes itself” (Heidegger, B&T, p.231).

In the face of anxiety, the world becomes irrelevant. It points to the conclusion that Heidegger is giving the hint: “anxiety reveals the nothing” (Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” Trans by Krell in Basic Writings, p.101). The revelation of the nothing, points to the fact that anxiety must be the vessel where one can encounter the nothing. In anxiety Dasein experiences the slipping away of the world as such.

 

If indeed anxiety reveals the nothing, then how is it with the nothing? How is Dasein in the face of the nothing? It is through the experience of the nothing that Dasein begins to wander. Dasein wanders in the sense of gripping its ownmost possibilities as a being-in-the-world.  Faced with bare nothingness of the world, Dasein is shocked, thus it now becomes aware that its existence was hijacked by the dictatorship of the ‘they’. At this point, Heidegger departs from his analysis of existence as ‘fallenness’ and offers the thought that in anxiety Dasein comes face to face with itself, such that it cannot anymore hide from the ‘they’. In anxiety Dasein becomes uncanny which for Heidegger means not-being-at-home in the world. Because the world slips away Dasein feels not at home in the world. Thus, the experience of anxiety makes Dasein to hover in nothingness.  He argues: 

We hover in anxiety. Moreover, precisely, anxiety leaves us hanging because it induces the slipping away of beings as a whole. This implies that we ourselves- we humans who are being- in the midst of beings slip away from ourselves. At bottom therefore it is not as though ‘you’ or ‘I’ feel at ease; rather, it is this hovering where there is nothing to hold on to, pure Dasein [existence] is all that is still there. (Heidegger, What is Metaphysics, p.101).

The revelation of the nothing ushers the disclosure of Dasein’s being as Care. It is when something goes wrong that Dasein begins to care. It is when it losses something that Dasein recognizes its value. It is when there is no one where it can hold on to that Dasein begins to care. It is when one’s dearest girlfriend withdraws that he will come to know her importance.  It is when faced with the nothing that Dasein recognizes its contingency thus begins to grip its potentiality-for-Being. In the face of anxiety Dasein realizes its thrownness and facticity, and thus has a foretaste of its being-towards-death. Experiencing such, Dasein thrusts itself to be authentic. Dasein begins to care for its future by claiming its own self that was absorbed in the ‘they’. 

However, Heidegger explained that this nothing, revealed in anxiety is not pure nothingness. Rather it is in the encounter of the nothing that one can claim its true self and grip its ownmost possibility. He puts it: 

Instead of seeing that being held into the nothing is not some present at hand property of Dasein as compared with something else equally present at hand, but is rather a fundamental way in which Dasein as such brings forth its ability to be. The nothing is not an empty nothingness that allows nothing to be present at hand, but is that power which constantly thrusts us back, which alone thrusts us into being and lets us assume power over our Dasein [existence] (Heidegger, TFCM, p.299).

It is only in the nothing that beings as whole in accord with their most proper possibility come to themselves.  

        Heideggerian analysis of anxiety points to two things. In anxiety one can either flight from itself and be re-absorbed and hide to the ‘they’ or be open to its ownmost possibility, which Heidegger calls as resoluteness or authenticity.