The Temporality of Fear – Part 2 (BT341/342) (2024) Painting by Noël Van Hoof

Martin Heidegger – Being and Time – BT341/342

The awaiting which fears is one which is afraid 'for itself'; that is to say, fearing in the face of something, is in each case a fearing about; therein lies the character of fear as mood and as affect. When one's Being-in-the-world has been threatened and it concerns itself with the ready-to-hand, it does so as a factical potentiality-for-Being of its own. In the face of this potentiality one backs away in bewilderment, and this kind of forgetting oneself is what constitutes the existential-temporal meaning of fear. Arustotle rightly defines “fear” as λύπη τις ἠ ταραχἠ – as “a kind of depression or bewilderment”. This depression forces Dasein back to its thrownness, but in such a way that this thrownness gets quite closed off. The bewilderment is based upon a forgetting. When one forgets and backs away in the face of a factical potentiality-for-Being which is resolute, one clings to those possibilities of self-preservation and evasion which one has already discovered circumspectively beforehand. When concern is afraid, it leaps from next to next, because it forgets itself and therefore does not take hold of any definite possibility. Every 'possible' possibility offers itself, and this means that the impossible ones do so too. The man who fears, does not stop with any of these; his 'environment' does not disappear, but it is encountered without his knowing his way about in it any longer. This bewilderment making-present of the first thing that comes into one's head, is something that belongs with forgetting oneself in fear. It is well known, for instance, that the inhabitants of a burning house will often 'save' the most indifferent things that are most closely ready-to-hand. When one has forgotten oneself and makes present a jumble of hovering possibilities, one thus makes possible that bewilderment which goes to make up the mood-character of fear. The having forgotten which goes with such bewilderment modifies the awaiting too and gives it the character of a depressed or bewildered awaiting which is distinct from any pure expectation.
The specific ecstatical unity which makes it existentially possible to be afraid, temporalizes itself primarily out of the kind of forgetting characterized above, which, as a mode of having been, modifies its Present and its future in their own temporalizing. The temporality of fear is a forgetting which awaits and makes present. The common-sense interpretation of fear, taking its orientation from what we encounter within-the-world, seeks in the first instance to designate the 'oncoming evil' as that in the face of which we fear, and, correspondingly, to define our relation to this evil as one of “expecting”. Anything else which belongs to the phenomenon remains a 'feeling of pleasure or displeasure'.

(Translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson)

Related themes

Fear