From: "Anthony Crifasi" <crifasi-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Explicit text on how anxiety is "constant"
Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2003 18:29:24 +0000


Rene de Bakker wrote:

>Comparing DIFFERENCES is metaphysical, since differences imply different
>things (something "had" by one thing but "lacked" by another thing). But
>Heidegger still says that we can have a DIFFERENT without a DIFFERENCE.
>
>Anthony Crifasi
>
>I can't see what you mean. But 'compare' What is metaphysics again, where
>the Nothing is at fist taken as the denial of everything. Then it would
>be the result of the human act of denying. In fact a special, extreme case
>amongst all other denying. But to be denied, beings as a whole must already
>be there. Where he writes: Indeed! that's important.

Great reference Rene, because in "What Is Metaphysics" is the following text 
which pertains to the above, to our long discussion of anxiety, and also to 
the o/o distinction in general. First, Heidegger raises precisely the 
problem about anxiety we have been discussing, which is how anxiety can be 
rare if what it reveals is constitutive of our very being-in-the-world on 
ALL occasions:

"If Dasein can relate itself to beings only by holding itself out into the 
nothing and can exist only thus; and if the nothing is originally disclosed 
only in anxiety; THEN MUST WE NOT HOVER IN THIS ANXIETY CONSTANTLY IN ORDER 
TO BE ABLE TO EXIST AT ALL? AND HAVE WE NOT OURSELVES CONFESSED THAT THIS 
ORIGINAL ANXIETY IS RARE? But above all else, we all do exist and relate 
ourselves to beings which we may or may not be - without this anxiety."

He answers firstly that the rareness of anxiety means precisely that the 
Nothing which it reveals is still CONSTANT but repressed in everdayness:

"Yet what does it mean that this original anxiety occurs only in rare 
moments? Nothing else than that the nothing is at first and for the most 
part distorted with respect to its originality. How, then? In this way: we 
usually lose ourselves altogether among beings in a certain way. The more we 
turn toward beings in our preoccupations the less we let beings as a whole 
slip away as such and the more we turn away from the nothing. Just as surely 
do we hasten into the public superficies of existence. And yet this CONSTANT 
if ambiguous turning away from the nothing accords, within certain limits, 
with the most proper significance of the nothing. In its nihilation the 
nothing directs us precisely toward beings. THE NOTHING NIHILATES 
INCESSANTLY WITHOUT OUR REALLY KNOWING OF THIS OCCURRENCE IN THE MANNER OF 
OUR EVERYDAY KNOWLEDGE."

He then attributes precisely the same kind of constancy to anxiety:

"The saturation of existence by nihilative behavior testifies to the 
constant though doubtlessly obscured manifestion of the nothing that only 
anxiety originally reveals. But this implies that the original anxiety in 
existence is usually repressed. ANXIETY IS THERE. IT IS ONLY SLEEPING. ITS 
BREATH QUIVERS PERPETUALLY THROUGH DASEIN, only slightly in those who are 
jittery, imperceptibly in the ‘Oh, yes’ and the ‘Oh, no’ of men of affairs; 
but most readily in the reserved, and most assuredly in those who are 
basically daring."

So the rareness of anxiety does not mean that anxiety is only sometimes 
there. Rather, "Anxiety is there," even when it is repressed in 
everydayness. The latter is precisely what the "rareness" of anxiety means. 
Hence the scare quotes around "real" anxiety at SuZ 190, since this might 
give the mistaken impression that anxiety is sometimes not there (i.e., at 
which time there would supposedly be no "real" anxiety).

This constancy of anxiety parallels the constancy of EVERY existential that 
is constitutive of being-in-the-world as such. Similarly, mitsein is always 
"there," even when it is repressed in everyday Dasein as an "isolated I".

Anthony Crifasi

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