Why Heidegger on Anxiety?

1. Why Heidegger on Anxiety? I have chosen this topic because it • Intimates something of my research efforts at reconstructing Sein und Zeit • Is straight from the heart of 19th or 20th century German philosophy (including Heidegger) • Touches upon the philosophy of religion • Can be shown to be relevant for environmental philosophy (points to richer, more useful conceptions of selfhood than those implicit in standard economics and much sustainable development literature)

2. Heidegger on Anxiety – Reconstructing § 40 of Sein und Zeit anxietas: anxiety, anxiousness, strictly as a lasting state of mind, whereas angor (grief, anguish) is the transitory feeling

3. What I am going to give you ... • First a short presentation indicating what issues Heidegger’s discussion of anxiety addresses ... • Then the mini-paper „Using Luther to Understand Heidegger on Anxiety“, which shows how this discussion addresses these issues.

4. A Principal Condition of Adequacyon the Reconstruction of § 40 We must understand why Heidegger talks about anxiety at all, and in particular why he does so here, in § 40. In other words, we must interpret § 40 in such a way that we can see how it contributes to the overall objective of Division I in Sein und Zeit. So what is the fundamental issue or question driving Division I?

5. What is it to be a self, i.e., something capable of first-person thinking? By § 40 we have learnt that the self is: • Not a bundle of intentional states and experiences, pace Hume, James and the early Husserl • But also not, or not just, a bearer of intentional states and experiences (however embodied and however much in causal interaction with other things) • At least a locus of such social roles as academic, environmentalist, parent, etc. - roles whose socialness consists in their existing relative to a body of shared belief as to what one does in the course of acting out these roles. As Heidegger would put it, the self is at least a one-self (man-selbst) existing in essential relation to the One (das Man) – see Ch. 4 (§§ 25-27) of Sein und Zeit.

6. But is this the last word on selfhood? • Is it enough to describe the self in these terms, namely, as a locus of masks (personae)? • Or does the very possibility of describing the self in these terms require there to be a deeper sense of self which is occluded when, with Pufendorf and Brandom, one declares the one-self (man-selbst) to be the last word on what the self necessarily is?

7. According to Heidegger we do need a deeper sense of self .... But why might he think this? His basis is, I suggest, this: Nothing counts as a self if it cannot context-sensitively mediate the demands of its different roles with one another and with reality itself. Example: The uni introduces some energy-intensive technology which enhances that for the sake of which one is a uni lecturer, but undermines that for the sake of which one is an environmentalist. If to any great degree I fail effectively to resolve these kinds of conflict, I literally fall apart as a self, not just for others, but for myself – in which case I have no first-person acts of thought.

8. Guided by this thought, Heidegger searches for a deeper sense of self ... • He wants to know how this meta-level mediating capacity is possible. What is its depth-structure? What are its presuppositions? • He believes that these questions can be answered by investigating the phenomenon of anxiety • He also wants to investigate the tradition of discourse about anxiety. For as Heidegger understands phenomenological investigation, a tradition of discourse about a phenomenon functions as a guide to its phenomenological investigation (interpretation). For this reason, Heidegger appeals to the ‘existentialist’Kierkegaard and others in his attempt to identify and describe the missing dimension of selfhood.

9. Turning now to § 40 itself ... Heidegger proceeds from the formal intentional structure of fear (Furcht). Fear is always fear of something for the sake of something. Example: I fear global warming for the sake of my children (or the diversity of life on Earth, or whatever). In general: I have fear in the face of X for the sake of Y (vor X um Y) Anxiety displays a similar formal structure But ... .

10. The Formal Intentional Structure of Anxiety … in its case, thinks Heidegger, X = Y (reflexivity)! He should have said: X and Y are interchangeable – symmetricality. The identity claim comes out in such passages as: „... the in-the-face-of-which (das Wovor) of anxiety is thrown ability-to-be-in-the-world; the for-the-sake-of-which (das Worum) is [ownmost] ability-to-be-in-the-world.“ (§ 41, H 191) At H 187 Heidegger describes the for-the-sake-of-which of anxiety as true (eigentliches) ability-to-be-in-the-world. This justifies my insertion of ownmost (eigenstes) into the quote from H 191.

11. What does the jargon mean? • We need a concrete case to work from. • Because we are doing phenomenology (as Heidegger understands it), this case should ideally combine, in the one person, the experience of anxiety with reflection (i.e., discourse) thereon. Heidegger assumes his readers to know of such cases, indeed, in note 1, H 190, he mentions two of them: Augustinus and Luther.

12. A Case Study in Anxiety:Martin Luther (1483-1546) This case study must enable us to fulfil the following two goals: It must permit us: • to make sense of the formal structure of anxiety • To explain why Heidegger discusses anxiety at all, and why here, in § 40 Accomplishing these goals will reveal the richer sense of self implicit in anxiety which Heidegger regards as presupposed by the notion of the one-self

13. Mini-Paper:Using Luther to Understand Heidegger on Anxiety § 1: Anxiety in the everyday, pre-philosophical sense § 2: Martin Luther’s anxiety § 3: The formal structure of anxiety and the role of anxiety in Sein und Zeit