Suddenly, I am overtaken by the mood of anxiety that renders the world meaningless. In other words, the world is homely (heimlich), cosy even. Heidegger's claim earlier in Division 1 of Being and Time ( discussed in blog 3), is that the human being finds itself in a world that is richly meaningful and with which it is fascinated. It is, Heidegger insists, 'nothing and nowhere'.īut let's back up for a moment here. Anxiety is experienced in the face of something completely indefinite. If fear is directed towards some distinct thing in the world, spiders or whatever, then anxiety is anxious about being-in-the-world as such. If fear is fearful of something particular and determinate, then anxiety is anxious about nothing in particular and is indeterminate. My non-spider fearing friend removes the offending arachnid, I am no longer fearful.

I see a spider in the bath and I am suddenly frightened. Fear has an object and when that object is removed, I am no longer fearful. His claim is that fear is always fear of something threatening, some particular thing in the world. Heidegger gives a phenomenology of fear earlier in Being and Time. In order to understand what Heidegger means by anxiety, we have to distinguish it from another mood he examines: fear. It was, of course, the mood that launched a thousand existentialist novels, most famously Sartre's Nausea and Camus's The Outsider (although Heidegger was very critical of existentialism). It is in anxiety that the free, authentic self first comes into existence. On the contrary, Heidegger says that anxiety is a rare and subtle mood and in one place he even compares it a feeling of calm or peace. The first thing to grasp is that anxiety does not mean ceaselessly fretting or fitfully worrying about something or other.

As such, anxiety has an important methodological function in the argument of Being and Time.īut the existential resonance of anxiety is much more than methodological. The question Heidegger asks in Chapter 6 is: how is the being-in-the-world as a whole to be disclosed? Is there an experience where the world as such and as a whole is revealed to us? Is there a mood in which we pull back from the world and see it as something distinct from us? Heidegger's claim is that being-in-the-world as a whole is disclosed in anxiety and is then defined as care. The world fascinates us and my life is completely caught up in its rhythms and activities.

Our everyday existence is characterised by complete immersion in the ways of the world.

Heidegger safranski