Fear vs. Anxiety (BT185/186) (2024) Painting by Noël Van Hoof

Martin Heidegger – Being and Time – BT185/186

We are not entirely unprepared for the analysis of anxiety. Of course it still remains obscure how this is connected ontologically with fear. Obviously these are kindred phenomena. This is betokened by the fact that for the most part they have not been distinguished from one another: that which is fear, gets designated as “anxiety”, while that which has the character of anxiety, gets called “fear”. We shall try to proceed towards the phenomenon of anxiety step by step.
Dasein's falling into the “they” and the 'world' of its concern, is what we have called a 'fleeing' in the face of itself. But one is not necessarily fleeing whenever one shrinks back in the face of something or turns away from it. Shrinking back in the face of what fear discloses – in the face of something threatening – is founded upon fear; and this shrinking back has the character of fleeing. Our interpretation of fear as the state-of-mind has shown that in each case that in the face of which we fear is a detrimental entity within-the-world which comes from some definite region but is close by and is bringing itself close, and yet might stay away. In falling, Dasein turns away from i t s e l f. That in the face of which it thus shrinks back must, in any case, be an entity with the character of threatening; yet this entity has the same kind of Being as the one that shrinks back: it is Dasein itself. That in the face of which it thus shrinks back cannot be taken as something 'fearsome', for anything 'fearsome' is always encountered as an entity within-the-world. The only threatening which can be 'fearsome' and which gets discovered in fear, always comes from entities within-the-world.
Thus the turning-away of falling is not a fleeing that is founded upon a fear of entities within-the-world. Fleeing that is so grounded is still less a character of this turning-away, when what this turning-away does is precisely to turn thither towards entities within-the-world by absorbing itself in them. The turning-away of falling is grounded rather in anxiety, which in turn is what first makes fear possible.
To understand this talk about Dasein's fleeing in the face of itself in falling, we must recall that Being-in-the-world is a basic state of Dasein. That in the face of which one has anxiety [das Wovor der Angst] is Being-in-the-world as such.

(Translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson)

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Martin HeideggerFearAnxiety