Angstkraft, or, Danke für Nichts

Wenn man einem Ziele entgegengeht, so scheint es unmöglich, daß „die Ziellosigkeit an sich“ unser Glaubensgrundsatz ist. ¹

Most people would be surprised to learn how much of their daily behavior is motivated by the need to lessen or allay their anxiety. ²

When I first heard the word it must have been 1956 or '57.  My father, a country doctor, brought home a sample-package of Miltown® and to my question ‘What's it for?’ he replied ‘Anxiety.’  I cannot recall anything more of the context or conversation.  Maybe I asked ‘What's anxiety?,’ but I don't remember (it's been a long time).  I do remember another Q&A, and it may have arisen in this same exchange (say, through a follow-up question analogizing from polio, ‘How do people catch it?’).  . . .  Kid: ‘Am I going to die?’  Parent (transmitting das Man): ‘Yes, but not for a long time.’ (Man sagt: der Tod kommt gewiß, aber vorläufig noch nicht.³ )

So now to resume the inquiry:—“The child's question, ‘What is this thing?’, is thus answered by stating what it is used for, defining what one finds in terms of what one does with it. . . . The interpretation appresents the what-for of a thing and so brings out  the reference of ‘in-order-to.’  It brings to prominence ‘as what’ the encountered thing can be taken, how it is to be understood.” ⁴   If a drug is for treating (intermittently relieving) anxiety, then ‘What is this thing, anxiety?’  What's it for?  How is it to be understood operationally, dynamically?

Various texts give us to understand that anxiety is an ontological shove which intensifies sense-making activity  (and thereby accelerates entropy-production, the distal οὗ ἕνεκα).   Locus classicus is the manic Fort-Da from urbs to villa and back portrayed in the last 41 lines of De rerum natura, Book 3, where Lucretius observes hoc se quisque modo fugit , ‘in this way each one flees himself’.⁵  (Cf. today's inordinate fondness for RVs.)  Flees that part of self which is mors aeterna.⁶ Eternal death minus a long kinetic life still equals eternal death:

mors aeterna tamen nihilo minus illa manebit,

nec minus ille diu iam non erit, ex hodierno

lumine qui finem vitai fecit, et ille,

mensibus atque annis qui multis occidit ante.

Sooner or later each goes over The Falls into the vasty  deep, but the awareness makes us row ever harder against the current. ⁷

The question then becomes, What is self-fleeing's mechanism of action? How does it operate to give relief?  How does one flee one's Selbst?  How does flight ‘take your mind off’ anxiety?

Heidegger, two millennia later, repeats Lucretius on self-fleeing while adding his ontological gloss to the modus:— Das Aufgehen im Man und bei der besorgten »Welt« offenbart so etwas wie eine Flucht  des Daseins vor ihm selbst als eigentlichem Selbst sein-können. ⁸     Welch translates: “Absorption in the one and into the ‘world’ taken-care-of manifests some sort of flight of being-there from itself—itself as authentic ability-to-be-a-self.”⁹

Okay, but what does authentic ability-to-be-a-self have to do with mors? (And what's a Selbst anyway?)  “Death is the ownmost  possibility of being-there.  Being toward this possibility discloses to being-there its ownmost  ability to be, the one in which the being of being-there is purely and simply at issue.” ¹⁰   The understanding attunement (Stimmung) which does the disclosing here is Angst, dread: “In dread, being-there finds itself in the face of  the nothingness of the possible impossibility of its existence.  Dread dreads for  the ability-to-be of the one being so destined, and in this way discloses its most extreme possibility. . . . the basic attunement of dread belongs to this self-understanding of being-there at its very basis.  Being-toward-death is essentially dread.” ¹¹

Again, ‘What is this thing—anxiety, dread, Angst?’ Sheehan comments that Macquarrie & Robinson and Stambaugh & Schmidt

“translate SZ's Angst as ‘anxiety,’ which is not what Heidegger has in mind.  Anxiety is a psychological condition of intense and excessive worry, often accompanied by panic.  It is treatable with medications.  For Heidegger, on the other hand, Angst is a moment of profound calm (gebannte Ruhe ¹² ) when one suddenly has a first-hand insight into one's ex-sistence.  I paraphrase it as ‘dread’ in the archaic sense of ‘awe,’ a moment of wonder, surprise, and uncertainty that sets me back on my heels.” ¹³

So,  “Being-toward-death is essentially [a moment of profound calm, of awe, wonder, surprise and uncertainty that sets me back on my heels].”  “ The one does not allow for the courage of [a moment of profound calm, of awe, etc.] to arise in the face of death.”¹⁴   Here is the key passage on this archaic sense of dread as the condition of the possibility of medicable anxiety:

“And only because dread determines latently, always already, being-in-world, can being-in-world, as being near a ‘world’, attuned and taking-care, be afraid.  Fear is inauthentic dread [uneigentliche Angst], dread that has collapsed onto its ‘world’ and that is concealed from itself. Factically then, the mood of uncanniness remains for the most part existentielly not understood. Moreover, ‘real’ dread is rare, given the predominance of collapsing and of the public sphere. Often, dread is ‘physiologically’ conditioned. In its facticity, this factum is an ontological  problem, and not just in regard to how it is ontically caused and how it runs its course. Dread can only be triggered physiologically because being-there, at the very basis of its being, already dreads [weil das Dasein im Grunde seines Seins sich ängstet].”¹⁵

Sheehan paraphrases the German text this way:

“19. Dread and fear.  The reason I can experience fear is that dread, although usually latent, is inherent in my involvement in meaning and my relation to things.  Fear is the absorbed, non-authentic form of dread. 20. Psycho-physical factors in dread. I usually have no sense of the ab-surdity of my ex-sistence.  Since I am so absorbed in the public world, dread is a rarity.  It can be conditioned by psycho-physical factors but is an existential-ontological issue that lies deeper than the specific issue that occasions it or the personal way I experience it.  The reason dread can be psycho-physically triggered is that it already inhabits my ex-sistence.” ¹⁶

Again, insight-grade¹⁷  Angst is a tail-phenomenon,  distributionally infrequent: Eigentliche Angst ist . . . selten.   Instead, ‘from the start and for the most part,’

“These phenomena we have pointed out—temptation, tranquilization, alienation, and self-entangling (entanglement)—characterize the specific manner in which collapsing [Verfallen] has its being.  We call this ‘moved-ness’ of being-there, one essential to its own being: downfall [Absturz]. Being-there falls away from itself into itself—into the groundlessness and nothingness of inauthentic everydayness [der uneigentlichen Alltäglichkeit ]. Yet public interpretedness [die öffentliche Ausgelegtheit] keeps this fall concealed from being-there, and in this way: the fall is interpreted as ‘getting ahead’ and ‘really living.’  The manner in which downfall moves into, and within, the groundlessness of inauthentic being—being within the one [das Man]—constantly rips understanding loose from the projecting of authentic possibilities, rips it into the tranquilized presumption that it has everything, or that it achieves everything.  This constant ripping-loose from authenticity—always disguised as authenticity itself—together with this ripping into the one, characterizes the movedness of collapsing as vortex [die Bewegtheit des Verfallens als Wirbel].”¹⁸

This passage restates  traditional consensus about the means of self-fleeing.  For example, in his survey of philosophers of anxiety Rollo May recounts that

“Pascal was thus directly concerned with not only anxiety which he himself experienced but which he believed he observed underneath the surface of the lives of his contemporaries, evidenced by the ‘perpetual restlessness in which men pass their lives.’  He noted the unceasing endeavors of people to divert themselves, to escape ennui, to avoid being alone, until ‘agitation’ becomes an end in itself.  The great bulk of diversions, he felt, were actually endeavors of people to avoid ‘thoughts of themselves,’ for if they should pause for self-contemplation, they would be miserable and anxious.” ¹⁹

So also Kierkegaard, writing in The Sickness Unto Death :

“whereas one kind of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, another kind of despair seems to permit itself to be tricked out of its self by ‘the others.’ Surrounded by hordes of men, absorbed in all sorts of secular matters, more and more shrewd about the ways of the world—such a person forgets himself, forgets his name divinely understood, does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too hazardous to be himself, and far easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, a mass man.”²⁰

Zappfe asserts that cosmic panic, kosmisk panikfølelse, is basic to every human mind, and that “one's undivided attention and energy is required to stave off the catastrophic pressure of one's inner being.”  Survival, he goes on, “is made possible by a more or less conscious suppression [enfortrængning] of this hazardous surplus of consciousness [skadelige bevissthetsoverskudd]. This suppression is, for all intents and purposes, continuous; it goes on as long as we are awake and active [vaakne og virksomme], and becomes a condition for social adjustment and what is popularly called ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’ behavior.” ²¹   Indeed,

“All [human] life before our eyes is, from its innermost depths to its outermost rim, spun through and through with a crisscrossing net of suppression mechanisms [fortrængningsmekanismer], and we can trace their threads in the most trivial aspects of daily life. These mechanisms are of an almost infinitely colorful variety, but it seems justifiable to indicate at any rate four main types, which naturally occur in all manner of combinations: isolation , attachment [forankring], diversion [distraktion], and sublimation.” ²²  

Suffice to say these combinations are all verfallensmäßig in their effect.  So, same question:—how do suppression mechanisms suppress?  How do Verfallen and Aufgehen work?

Heidegger's older contemporary Kurt Goldstein distinguishes (citing Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger) Furcht and Angst:

“In the state of fear, we have an object in front of us which we can ‘meet,' which we can attempt to remove or from which we can flee.  We are conscious of ourselves as well as of the object, we can deliberate how we shall behave towards it, and we can look at the cause of the fear which actually lies spatially before us.  On the other hand, anxiety attacks us from the rear, so to speak. The only thing we can do is attempt to flee from it without knowing where to go, because we experience it as coming from no particular place. This flight is sometimes successful, though merely by chance, and usually fails: anxiety remains with us.” ²³  

It's there, Heidegger says, only dormant. ²⁴   Alas, no joy from Goldstein re the mechanism of action by which ‘this flight is sometimes successful.’  Nevertheless, recent developments in neurophysiology do prompt a conjecture:— daß das Dasein im DMN seines Gehirns sich ängstet .  Uneigentliche Angst gets generated in the activity of the default mode network of the brain, ²⁵  whereas the task positive network (TPN, aka executive control network, ECN) is Angstlos.  Activation of the TPN deactivates the DMN, with consequent relief from experience of anxiety so long as TPN is virksomme.

The activations of DMN and TPN (ECN) are negatively correlated.  For example, Shaggy-Haired Angel recounts her experience of a shift from texting  to cringe:

“When I send a long honest message to someone, I often feel cringe right after sending it like I've shared too much.  And I try to notice how this shift happens.  I noticed that while writing [thumbing the keypad on her phone], choosing words, the world shows up as a continuous field of action.  I'm completely within the process.  Nothing stands out. Everything is connected. Even the person I'm writing to is not separate.  They are the direction of the action.  But the moment the message is sent, right after I press the button, something shifts. The message becomes something finished, something that can be interpreted.  And the world begins to appear as a space of evaluation and interpretation.  Suddenly everything becomes unstable. Everything can be read differently.  The world reveals itself as a space of vulnerability. What has been done no longer belongs to what it came from. It is open to how it can be received. Time changes as well.  It becomes looping, returning again and again to what has already happened, to the message I've just sent, but each time in a different light. So this feeling of cringe isn't just an emotion. It's a way in which the world reveals itself as unstable, unfixed, dependent on a possible perspective.” ²⁶     

Umschlag  from ‘Nothing stands out. Everything is connected’ to ‘a space of vulnerability,’ ‘unstable, unfixed’ with looping ‘evaluation and interpretation.’  How did it happen?

Vinod Menon describes the DMN as “a collection of distributed and interconnected brain regions that are typically suppressed when an individual is focused on external stimuli; however, in the absence of attention to external stimuli, the DMN switches or ‘defaults’ to internally focused thought processes, such as self-reflection, daydreaming, mind wandering, recall of personal experiences, and envisioning the future.” ²⁷   Functions subserved by the DMN include self-reference, social cognition, episodic memory and its role in personally relevant aspects of remembered experiences, language comprehension and semantic memory, and mind wandering. ²⁸    Further, “suppression of the DMN and engagement of cognitive control networks during task performance are thought to be controlled by a common mechanism;” “these dynamic processes result in disengagement of the DMN from cognitive control systems, enabling focused attention and working memory for goal-directed behaviors.” ²⁹  

“Dasein is the being whose being is at issue for it.” Das Dasein ist Seiendes, dem es in seinem Sein um dieses selbst geht. ³⁰  ‘Goes about this very being.’  The DMN's ‘going about’ generates the sense of being a self (Selbstsein). As in Menon's view,

“The DMN is an integrative system that facilitates the construction of an ongoing internal narrative . . . These narratives shape our understanding of our individual, highly personal, experiences. . . . a coherent internal narrative in the context of our experiences and shared social interactions.  This narrative, part monolog and part dialog, is central to the construction of the ‘epistemic self,’ component processes of which include episodic memories; semantic knowledge of facts about one's life and the world; representations of individual values and beliefs; and the ability to experience and produce evaluative directions to our perceptions, actions, and reasoning.” ³¹  

DMN ist Sorge. “The essential wholeness of being-there as care means: ahead-of-itself-already being-in (a world) as being-near (encountered inner-worldy beings).” ³²  The three temporal ecstasies of care show up In the words of another research group's summary that the DMN “plays a key role in shaping our sense of self through memory, understanding others, and imagining the future.” ³³    

“Self-interpretation belongs to the being of being-there. . . . however mythical and magical its interpretation might be.” ³⁴   I.e., self-interpretation exhibits a wide range of variation.  Yet because we are hyper-aware social primates we ‘take our measure’ for the most part from other Daseins. As Heidegger describes it:

“With taking-care of whatever one has seized upon—with, for, or against others—there constantly lurks [ruht ständig] care about how one differs from the others, whether only to level out the difference, or to catch up with others after falling behind, or to suppress others from one's own position of priority.  Our being-with-one-another is disquieted [beunruhigt] by care about this distance.” ³⁵  

“Others are initially ‘there’ on the basis of what one has heard about them, how one talks about them, what one knows about them. . . . Initially and mostly, each pays attention to the others: to how they behave and   to what they will say about how they behave.  Being-with-one-another in the one [Das Miteinandersein im Man] is not at all a settled and indifferent side-by-side-ness; it is rather a tense and ambiguous paying-attention-to-one-another, a furtive eavesdropping-on-one-another.  Behind the mask of a for-one-another there is a game of against-one-another.” ³⁶

Self-interpretation emerges through the activity of the DMN; hence ‘dysregulation’ of the DMN in its engagement with other networks in the brain may lead to ‘pathological’ self-interpretations—“a disrupted self-narrative and increased self-other monitoring contribute to symptoms like constant rumination, negative memory bias, and unhelpful self-focus.” ³⁷   Scare-quotes because I take variation as the primordial phenomenon, and ‘disorder’ as a way variation can show up sub specie normativity.  For example, the variant of hyperactivity in the DMN can alter “mentalization, the capacity to understand the mental states of others,” into “a threat mechanism.  As a result, the simulation of others' judgments becomes exaggerated and distorted, increasing self-monitoring and the fear of negative evaluation.” ³⁸  

The literal sense of ‘to cringe’ is to flinch, shrink back, etc. ³⁹   “The in-the-face-of-which of this shrinking-back [Zurückweichen; the phenomenon described by S-HA], must, by its overall character, be threatening [des Bedrohens haben]; yet it is a being having its being the way that the being that is shrinking-back has its being: it is being-there itself [es ist das Dasein selbst].”⁴⁰   And das Dasein selbst  is . . . who?  

“Initially, being-there is the one—and mostly it remains so.” ⁴¹  “The ‘who’ is the neuter: the one;” “the inconspicuous domination [Herrschaft] on the part of others, a domination stemming unawares from being-there as being-with;” an “effective dictatorship [eigentliche Diktatur].”⁴² That is,

“By its very nature, being-with-one-another takes care of averageness. It is an existential characteristic of the one.  It is what is at issue for the one in the one's very being [Dem Man geht es in seinem Sein wesentlich um sie]. For this reason, being-there maintains itself factically within the averageness of the proper thing to do, of what is and is not allowed, of that to   which success is accorded or denied. Prefiguring what can and may be ventured, this averageness keeps watch over [wacht über] every pending exception.” ⁴³

‘Like I've shared too much.’  Too much for the Watcher, the Monitor, the Keeper of Durchschnittlichkeit. To alter the line from Prufrock: ‘That is not what one shares at all;  That is not shared, at all.’

How not to yield to the Herrschaft of das Man and its enforcer, uneigentliche Angst? “If and when being-there uncovers the world on its own, bringing it near to itself, if and when it discloses to itself its authentic being [i.e.,  Mit dem Tod steht sich das Dasein selbst in seinem eigensten Seinkönnen bevor. ⁴⁴ ], such uncovering of ‘world’ and disclosing of being-there always takes place as a clearing away of cover-ups and obfuscations—as a shattering of the disguises with which being-there seals itself off from itself.” ⁴⁵

To shatter die uneigentliche Angst of das Man needs the mace  of eigentliche Angst, Wonder Dread®. Too bad about the factical rarity, faktische Seltenheit. ⁴⁶   Meanwhile toggle on the TPN:—yoke the ponies, gas the RV, or draft another note. ⁴⁷

DCW 05/12/2026

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