We're often encouraged to think about anxiety as a
particular state of mind, or even a disorder from
which some people suffer.
The two readings from Heidegger this week offer
a profoundly different picture of anxiety.
For Heidegger, anxiety is a fundamental mood
that discloses us in our very being.
It's through anxiety that we find out who we are.
Now, why is this the case?
Well, for Heidegger, who we are is what he calls Dasein.
Now you've encountered this word in doing the reading.
And if you haven't read Heidegger before, you're
probably pretty confused about what it means.
Dasein D A S E I N is a German word that means existence.
It's an interesting word,
however, and one that translators usually keep
in German, because it's a combination of two
other German words: da, which means "there," and
Sein, which means being.
So Dasein is this word for existence that literally
means "being there."
This is essential for Heidegger.
He plays a lot with the literal meaning of this
word, because for him, it shows that being is always
being in the world, being in an environment, being
there, being somewhere.
Existence is always already outside of itself.
To exist means to stand outside oneself in the
sense that we have the capacity to distance
ourselves from our own existence and reflect on it.
I am able to ask questions such as, "Who
am I and why am I here?"
But this ability to distance myself is rooted in my
situatedness in the world.
I'm never fully distant or fully separate
from my environment.
I'm always in relation to it.
Now, anxiety discloses a fundamental way of
relating to my environment and to my world.
And this way of relating is the mode of nothingness.
You may have sometimes found yourself going about your
daily life, you know, doing your random activities,
doing your work, talking with friends, et cetera.
And then having a moment of catching yourself,
wondering why am I here?
Or you find yourself suddenly experiencing a familiar
word, appearing unfamiliar.
Or you enter a place you've been to many times before, but
suddenly it seems different.
It seems off.
In these situations, we get jolted out of
our almost robotic, habitual way of living
and we come face to face
with the fact that we exist in relation to that world,
that we exist as freedoms in relation to that world.
This is the disclosure of the nothing, for Heidegger.
So anxiety is that moment of being jolted out of
your everyday way of living and seeing that
things are kind of funny.
Oh, I'm expected to go to this meeting at 4:00 PM.
But I could not go to that meeting.
And it's up to me to go to that meeting and only
me to go to that meeting.
That is anxiety for Heidegger.
Now, anxiety, He notes, is something that it's not
like we're experiencing it all the time.
Right.
It's quite unpleasant to experience in many cases.
And it's nice to go about our lives without a constant
anxiety surrounding us.
Right.
There's a reason why people who experience anxiety
constantly want to find some way to get out of
that, to resolve the state.
And so it's not as if he's saying like let's
be anxious all the time.
He's acknowledging that it only appears in certain
contexts, but he says that the certain contexts in which it
appears actually reveal that anxiety was sort of there in a
quiet, asleep state all along, because we are always free in
relation to our environment.
And we are always in a sense outside of ourselves,
having this unique relation to our world.
Anxiety for Heidegger is a peculiar experience of no
longer feeling at home in the world, but we can only
no longer feel at home in the world if we already did
feel at home in the world.
So part of the beauty in anxiety is that by removing
our state of being at home in the world, we come to
recognize that we were at home in the world to begin with.
In the same way that feeling a pinch in our shoe reveals
to us and makes us appreciate the comfort that we had before
we had the pinch in our shoe.
This state of not feeling at home in the world is the
German word Unheimlichkeit, which literally means
unhomeliness, but is often translated as uncanniness.
When things feel uncanny, bizarre, strange,
they are unhomely.
So you might reflect on an example in your own life of
when you have felt the sort of dizziness of nothingness,
the dizziness of freedom.
Perhaps it came about when you realized that you could
do things differently than you have always done them.
Perhaps you realize that the delimited set of options
that were given to you
are not the only options there are, and that
you could choose to do nothing or to do something
entirely out of left field.
In a sense, the experience of nothingness that when
encounters in anxiety is the source of creativity.
Heidegger says that anxiety can evoke wonder, and
that it is in alliance with creative longing and
with cheerfulness even.
Because that moment of anxiety can cause us to
sort of come into our own for the first time.
For Heidegger, anxiety is the fundamental mood of
nothingness and nothingness paves the way for us to
be able to become a self and to be able to actively
take up our own freedom.
This is for instance, one reason, perhaps,
that a lot of adolescents feel themselves anxious.
Because they're emerging out of the acceptance of habitual
ways of being in childhood, but they're not yet at the
place where they're accepting the status quo as adult.
Those of you who have studied existentialism before may hear
some strong resonances with other existentialist thinkers.
And indeed, even though Heidegger never called
himself an existentialist, he is generally
considered to be one.
Those of you who studied existentialism will also
know that practically nobody who was an existentialist
called themselves an existentialist except
for Sartre and Beauvoir.
But in any case, this theme of nothingness as
disclosing freedom, and of anxiety as triggering that
experience of nothingness, is one that Heidegger takes
from previous existential thinkers, such as Søren
Kierkegaard, the 19th-century Danish philosopher.
One of the elements of theory of anxiety that Heidegger
picks up on in the texts we're reading for today
is the idea that anxiety is different from fear.
Fear has a determinate object.
So I'm afraid of spiders or I'm afraid of heights,
or I'm afraid of vases!
In any case, those determinate objects that fear has are
what characterizes fear.
And we tend to flee things that we are afraid of.
Anxiety has a very different relation to its
object because anxiety doesn't have a determinate
object for Heidegger.
It doesn't actually make sense to say that you're anxious
about something, right.
To say you're anxious about an upcoming essay or about
finding a job after college.
What you are actually anxious about is nothing.
When you think you are anxious about finding a
job after college, you are actually anxious about
your own nothingness.
The fact that you are a freedom.
For Heidegger and for existentialists in general,
freedom and nothingness are very closely interwoven.
You are anxious about the fact that it must be you who
takes on the task of finding the job who gets the job,
who shows up to the job.
And so you're not actually anxious about getting a
job, according to Heidegger, so much as you are anxious
about your own nothingness in relation to the job.
The fact that you could not find any job at all.
The fact that you could not show up to the job
on the first day of work.
The fact that literally nothing is determining
that you will get a job.
You might have a lot of factors going in
your favor, right?
Graduating from an excellent college, having a couple of
jobs and internships under your belt, having good grades.
But none of those is determining that
you'll get a job.
They're just making it more likely there is this profound
gap or nothingness between the factors of yourself in
your past history and your environment that are leading
you towards getting a job,
and the actual job that you may or may not get, and
that gap is nothingness.
It is your freedom.
It's the fact that nobody can live your life for you,
can get the job for you.
One way that Heidegger talks about this in other
parts of Being and Time is that nobody can die
your own death for you.
Even if somebody sacrifices themselves for
you, they will still be dying their own death.
Death individualizes us.
Anxiety individualizes us.
And it individualizes us not by making us into this entire
whole of "Here are all of your characteristics and qualities
and you are defined by those," but it individualizes you by
making you realize that you are your own nothingness.
You are your own freedom.
And although this might sound pretty scary, it
involves quite a lot of responsibility, right?
Heidegger suggests that anxiety brings with it
a certain kind of calm because it means that we
are no longer fleeing.
When we come face to face with something that we're
afraid of, our instinct is often to flee it.
But because anxiety has no determinate object, if we
rest in it, we're actually resting in nothingness.
That, for Heidegger, can bring about a sense of peace
and repose and acceptance of the nothingness that we are.
Of the fact that as much as our environments are
buoying us up and in some cases pressing us down,
they are also not the whole story.
Yes, we are Dasein.
We are being in the world, but we are also in a very
important sense nothing.
We are freedom.