The mood of anxiety on Heidegger

INTRODUCTION
The mood of anxiety is a central concept in Heidegger's Dasein explanation in several ways. First of all, if we
consider the structure of being and time itself, we can became aware of that is articulated around the question
about Being and, of course, about the way it is or it can be questioned. This is the starting point which
Heidegger depart from towards Dasein definition, this is, towards the unique being which can formulate such
question and, even more, towards the being whose structure is shaped by the questioning itself. At this point,
anxiety becomes a fundamental issue as far as it can be regarded as the motive, as the sparkle which make
Dasein look for an answer.
Anxiety is closely involved as well to keep floating main Heidegger's Dasein characteristics, such as
throwness, care or being−towards−death, as I'll try to show.
DASEIN OUTLINE
If we want to understand the meaning of anxiety, we have to try to point out, at least, the function it has into
Dasein ontological structure. All of this drives us unavoidably towards a brief description of Dasein, towards
a brief inventory of some of its characteristics that I need to mark the general borders of anxiety concept.
Let us begin with saying that Dasein is the special and unique being which has an idea about what being is,
about what being mean −although it is not a conceptualised, clearly defined idea, but a pre−understanding−.
This particular being is thrown into the world, into a world composed of another beings, some of which have
the same skill that Dasein, this is: it's thrown among beings (which classical philosophy would call objects)
and among other Daseins (which classical terminology would define as subjects or consciousness, or cogitos).
This being−in−the−world has to be understood not in the classical way; Dasein is not a new cogito, it is not
again the isolated bourgeois consciousness in front of a nature waiting to be tamed. That is exactly what
Heideggers is trying to fight against. Thus, the world has to be regarded on one hand has the net of
interrelations between things and between things and Dasein; and, on the other hand, as the opened
possibilities of Dasein, as the materials to build Dasein future. These two affirmations take us to two
specifications: a) beings around Dasein are, at least in the inauthentic way of Dasein life,
things−ready−to−hand, which means that they are considered only according to their usefulness (or
uselessness), and they even exist according to that; b) world, then, is inside the very core of Dasein
ontological structure, and it's, as such, just the possibilities of Dasein developments; this means that it exists
only as far as it's Dasein world of possibilities, not because Dasein creates the world, but because the world
itself is understood by Dasein only in terms of what is useful for it (and that is all the world).
Finally, the last subject I would like to touch in reference to this Dasein description is understanding. Dasein
has a pre−understanding of what is being, due to its own ontological structure. This can be noticed in the own
questioning about being since it involves a kind of knowledge about what are we looking for.
Thus, to sum up, we would have something like this: Dasein is the ontological structure of man as a being, a
being which is characterized for being capable of asking for its own being nature, for having a
pre−understanding of what being is and for finding itself already being among other beings which are mainly
interpreted by it as beings−ready−to−hand.
FIRST APPROACHING TO THE CONCEPT: ONTOLOGICAL VIEW AGAINST PSICOLOGICAL VIEW
In trying to make a concept clearer, sometimes it's a good thing to say what is not that concept, and that is
what I'm going to attempt.
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If we speak about anxiety we have to speak about mood, since it is one of the main Being and Time
contributions to philosophy. Moods, it would be argued by empirical psychology, are just states of mind in
which we can find a person in a certain moment. This concrete mood, it would be continued, it's determined
or, at least, conditioned by internal and external (but always empirical and calculable) facts which can be
found.
Without discrediting this, Heidegger is going to say that behind every psychological mood, beyond every state
of mind which is conditioned by facts, by the everydayness, there are ontological moods which they can be
reduced to and that can be explained according to. So, Heideggers asserts that the common states of mind has
no real entity, while they only do the following: they just scrap the thin covering of everydayness and leave us
in front of our ontological mood. Therefore, the empirical cause it's not that important, since it just make use
direct our glance towards reality.
Anxiety is the best example (and the source of the description) of a mood, an ontological mood. In it we can
find clearly the parallelism between psychological and ontological moods (depression/anxiety) and it is the
state which make Dasein awake to its own and authentic existence, as I'll try to show. Depression can be
explained as something caused by bad experiences, such as unsuccessful love, academic failures but the point
is that it also can be due to no cause or, at least, to hidden ones (and that is, in my opinion −although I'm not a
psychologist− the special characteristic which make it be differenced from any other mental disease). Thus,
Heidegger takes advantage of the absence of object of depression to keep on looking for something deeper.
And what's what he finds? An ontological mood, an ontological state of mind (and state of being, it could be
said) that is touched, that is brought into conscience every time we feel that peculiar psychological mood that
depression is. This is an ontological mood. It's not just a deeper or stronger feeling, but it is something which
is in our ontological structure, in our own way of being a being. And this ontological mood, just as its
psychological correspondence, it's defined as well by object absence.
ANXIETY AND NOTHINGNESS
Anxiety, as I had said before, is an ontological mood in which the object that Dasein is worried about doesn't
exist. This could be misunderstood as whether the object was hidden or disappeared, so I have to add: there's
no object at all, because the one which make Dasein be worried is, precisely, nothing, or more exactly:
nothingness. Which is behind depression, behind that no−object worry, is the realizing of the fact that there is
no object at all, and not even subject. Why? Because Dasein, through anxiety, can have a look on beings and
verify that there's nothing beyond them that grants their existence; they are, then, a pure nothingness. The
question is: why they are something, they are beings, instead or being nothingness? Thus, we finally arrive to
the real knot: there's nothing that supports being existence, so my existence cannot be supported by any of
them, ergo, why is not me, why is not Dasein nothingness instead of Being?
Dasein is able now to regard itself as a nothingness thrown among nothingness. So this homeless feeling
about Dasein throwness among things, about finding itself already being, has to be added to nothingness
anxiety.
ANXIETY AND AUTHENTICITY
We have said that realizing beings nothingness Dasein become conscious of its own nothingness, since there's
no being, no entity that can support Dasein Being. But we can say more about this ontological anxiety
involved in that revelation: it's not only the discovery of external objects groundlessness (which, nevertheless,
would be itself a legitimate source of anxiety), since we know that, according to Heidegger, beings and the
total relationship net between them and between them and Dasein itself −this is, the world− are a piece of
Dasein ontological structure. That is so, as we said, because beings are understood by Dasein as
being−at−hand, as being as far as they are useful things, and the world itself constitutes a part of Dasein too.
But, even more important than that (and this is the point) is that being−ready−to−hand and the world are the
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open future possibilities of Dasein. World is world only as far as it's Dasein's world of possibilities, so what is
falling down into nothingness is Dasein's future, Dasein's development possibilities. So, in proper words,
anxiety phenomenon take place always inside of Dasein, which is, in this sense, the only real being in the
world.
Thereby, following anxiety path, Dasein is now in front of its own nothingness and groundless. Will it
stagnate in its own emptiness? According to Heidegger, this is the starting point for Dasein real existence.
After this falling is when we are speaking truthfully about Dasein. Heidegger word for this is authenticity and
has, as it can be supposed, an opposite term, what Heiddegger named inauthenticity, an inauthentic life.
Inauthentic life is what we can call normal life, or even alienated life. It involves concrete attitudes towards
things and to other Daseins, which are well defined by readiness−to−hand, this is, the instrumental attitude
towards things and, a fact which is more important, towards other Daseins, which would became
instrumentalised (we can find links between these topic and Marx's alienation, Marcuse's instrumental
rationality). It involves too to be lost, in a certain way, among the tasks, the everydayness. This is a lost of
Dasein itself, a forgetting of itself: the question of being is forgotten here and man mortality too.
That's why anxiety is not an end but a beginning, not a tragedy, but the shock Dasein need to awake. But, to
awake to what? To authentic life. Anxiety removes beings−to−hand worth, so common task, instrumental
thinking worth is removed too. Thus, Dasein realizes that it cannot come true dealing with beings. Inauthentic
life is devalued. This means (and here is impossible not to face the social involvements of the matter) that
common man, the man who is among others just doing the same that others, with no own thinking (this is the
same that saying with no thinking at all), carried away by the crowd, is placed in front of the problem of being
as his own problem, not just as a scientist in front of an interesting riddle.
It is well worth noting that the they, Das Man don't take seriously their existence. They just allow themselves
to live, within a kind of stunned state. And they resist to face their ontological isolation.
Thus, to sum up, we can say that anxiety plunge Dasein into a state of worry about its own nothingness. Then,
it realizes that nobody supports its life, and far from it the social values assumed with no previous reflection,
this is, the prejudices. So, from now on, it has to take care of its own life. That is the genuine way of being of
Dasein: to be the being which take care of itself, which know that there is nothing apart from it that can decide
instead of it (Sartre would say later that we are condemned to be free). To achieve that, Dasein has to
understand itself as a thrown project, as something that is waiting for be, this is, waiting for its possibilities to
be developed.
Therefore, anxiety is a kind of treatment against everyday consciousness.
ANXIETY AND DEATH
But one of the things that Dasein has to take over and that has more implications is death.
The first thing that needs to be said is that taking care of death illustrates what to care means. This is so
because death has a special property in relation to Dasein: Dasein can observe other's death as events, from a
scientific point of view, but never can contemplate its own death or even the idea of its own death in the same
way. This lead us to consider a common characteristic of Dasein and Death as concepts: both of them are
general concepts but absolutely individual, too. This is, both of them imply in their definition a large number
of entities −as large as the number of entities of the human kind− but that definition only take place properly
in each unique and never repeated Dasein. Dasein is, therefore, the being which, in each case, takes is own
being seriously as a problem. In the same way, we could say that Dasein is the being which take seriously its
own death, since death is inalienable: everyone has to face −at least− and to understand his/her own death (if
he/she take it seriously).
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Dasein, then, can understand itself authentically as a finite being, as a being−towards−death. It knows which
is the end, it knows that its entire life is aiming to death, to nothingness. But precisely because of this, because
it knows it fixed end, it can realize that no other of its possibilities are determined; through its finiteness it
arrive to its open possibilities.
CONCLUSION
I realize that I'm leaving aside quite a lot of anxiety involvements and links to Dasein, such as existential time
or being−towards−other−Daseins, but I haven't considered them close enough to the aim wanted.
Anyway, as a conclusion, I would like to speak about the moral and social meaning which can be tracked on
Heidegger's statements about the being.
The first that can be said, from a very personal point of view, is that Heidegger's Dasein seems to be the
repetition of that famous Kant's calling on his society: Sapere aude! Dare to know! Dare to think in your own,
without the baby−walkers of tradition (of Single Thought, today). Something like that is what Heidegger is
demanding from his age society, more exactly from every man: to keep themselves away from the stream of
thought and behaviour ruling in technical Western Society. Heidegger's word more frequently used for this
state of his contemporary world is decadence or fall, which, both, insert an incontrovertible moral shade.
The parallelism between Dasein and contemporary society is quite clear. On the one hand, Dasein is, in its
everydayness, in a false life, taking care only of the beings−ready−to−hand, the common task; and forgetting
the question about its own being, ignoring the nothingness around it; this is, not truthfully living. The state of
grace is recovered through anxiety.
For human kind, the story is similar: now we are plunged in a deep decadence, represented on the mass−men,
the main stream of thought that carry them on and on the technological way of knowledge. The state of grace
is placed by Heidegger in the ancient Greeks, in their first approaching to world, man and being knowledge,
this is: ancient Greeks philosophy. According to Heidegger, this first attempt was based on a kind of
phenomenological premises: they just attended to the things themselves, as it's said n the phenomenological
adage. But the later philosophy didn't do the same and built its concepts on Greeks concepts, loosing their real
worth. So now philosophy should retrace its steps and go back to elucidate its concepts (through etymology) if
it wants to rescue Western Society from falseness and, eventually, self−destruction.
The theoretical solution is, then, a task for philosophy. But if we consider Dasein's turning to authenticity as
the practical side of the transformation, we can find in that solution much more of common−places of Modern
Philosophy that we could expect. We are facing again the isolated bourgeois consciousness, alone in a hostile
environment, which only, which only answer for it is looking for certainly in itself. The indubitable cogito
ergo sum is now supplanted by I dead ergo I am, the inalienableness of my death is the new security of
contemporary man.
That's why I'm not very fond of search for easy parallelisms between Heidegger's main ideas and Nazism
ideology (if that pile of flagrant contradictions deserve such a name). He connection between Nazism and
Contemporary Philosophy doesn't need Heidegger as a link, because the premises and the explanation of
Second World War and Nazism phenomenon are, from my point of view, in Enlightenment Philosophy and
the ideologies which sprung up under its influence. More exactly, what arose during Nazism was the
consequence of the conscientious emptying out of bourgeois philosophy, which left and prepared the
individual to accept submissively the lurching of the new economy system and, as an indirect consequence,
Hitler's new order (and Mussolini's, and Franco's, and Stalin's and, even, the new technocracies').
Anyway, all of it is just to denote that Heidegger's biography can help us on understanding his thought, but his
well known links with Nazism shouldn't lead us to believe that his entire thinking was at Hitler's service, since
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it would make impossible to us to understand great thinkers such as Marx −which links with active communist
militancy is obvious−, Spinoza −main defender of the incipient Democratic Regime in Holland−, or even
Isaiah Berlin −a British civil servant− and Georgy Lùckacs −enganged with U.S.S.R. government an with
Hungarian Revolution in certain moments of his life−.
Although we can track for quite a lot of this in Heidegger's whole conception of world and man involved in
being and time, speaking personally.
Here we can already perceive some of the presuppositions that support Heidegger's conception of being: I
mean the critique against the technical way of knowledge widespread in Western society.
It reminds us unequivocally Plato's Cavern Myth: the philosopher taking charge of making men views to aim
from the shadows to the real things, the universal and eternal Ideas.
This side of the problem make me remind immediately Niezsche's God Murder. Dasein as an ontological
description (this cannot be forgotten, although I would like to say that it cannot be denied that it has
implications in other philosophical fields, such as moral and even politics) is now towards nothingness and
with no one's help, like man kind, like society, which after God Death is in a very similar situation: the chain
which went from social level to God, passing for economic, cultural and, above all −in Nietzsche view−,
moral level, got broken and not because of the weakest link (or maybe yes). And we can say so of the
individual: one's moral pattern, one's all behaviour has no more the backing of God, so one is forced to look
for new ones in his/her own, or to look for another supporting as good as the recently deceased, or to live with
no other support apart from him/herself (Heidegger's idea goes further on this last way; Nietszche solution
would be between the individual search and social search −the search of new common moral values, but
emerging from the new Super Man).
It make us think in one of the most widespread and important aims which every age philosophers has always
attempt to achieve: the dissolution of the separation between subject and object, betweens the World of Ideas
and de World of Facts, between mind and body, between theory and praxis And that is, in my opinions, one of
Heidegger's purposes as well, placing nothingness as the essence of existence (which is very similar to say
that existence has no essence apart from itself). Anyway, Heidegger didn't cover this journey until the end, as
Sartre would do later.
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