states-of-mind temporally, our aim is not one of deducing moods from temporality and dissolving them into pure phenomena of temporalizing. [341] All we have to do is to demonstrate that except on the basis of temporality, moods are not possible in what they 'signify' in an existentiell way or in how they 'signify' it. Our temporal Interpretation will restrict itself to the phenomena of fear and anxiety, which we have already analysed in a preparatory manner.
We shall begin our analysis by exhibiting the temporality of fear.v Fear has been characterized as an inauthentic state-of-mind. To what extent does the existential meaning which makes such a state-of-mind possible lie in what has been? Which mode of this ecstasis designates the specific temporality of fear? Fear is a fearing in the face of something threatening—of something which is detrimental to Dasein's factical potentiality-forBeing, and which brings itself close in the way we have described, within the range of the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand with which we concern ourselves. Fearing discloses something threatening, and it does so by way of everyday circumspection. A subject which merely beholds would never be able to discover anything of the sort. But if something is disclosed when one fears in the face of it, is not this disclosure a letting-something-come-towards-oneself [ein Auf-sich-zukommenlassen] ? Has not "fear" been rightly defined as "the expectation of some oncoming evil" [eines ankommenden Übels] ("malum futurum")? Is not the primary meaning of fear the future, and least of all, one's having been ? Not only does fearing 'relate' itself to 'something future' in the signification of something which first comes on 'in time' ; but this self-relating is itself futural in the primordially temporal sense. All this is incontestable. Manifestly an awaiting is one of the things that belong to the existential-temporal Constitution of fear. But proximally this just means that the temporality of fear is one that is inauthentic. Is fearing in the face of something merely an expecting of something threatening which is coming on ? Such an expectation need not be fear already, and it is so far from being fear that the specific character which fear as a mood possesses is missing. This character lies in the fact that in fear the awaiting lets what is threatening come back [zurückkommen] to one's factically concernful potentiality-for-Being. Only if that to which this comes back is already ecstatically open, can that which threatens be awaited right back to the entity which I myself am; only so can my Dasein be threatened.1 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;
1 Zurück auf das Seiende, das ich bin, kann das Bedrohliche nur gewärtigt, und so das Dasein bedroht werden, wenn das Worauf des Zurück auf ... schon überhaupt ekstatisch offen ist.'