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 exsistence. Since I am so absorbed in the public world, dread is a rarity. It can be conditioned by psycho-physical factors o but is an ex-sistential-ontological issue that lies deeper than the specific issue that occasions it or the personal way I experience it. The reason dread can it be psycho-physically triggered is that it already inhabits my ex-sistence.
21. Why dread has been overlooked. Western philosophy has rarely tried to examine the ex-sistential structure of genuine dread, due in part to philosophy’s failure to analyze ex-sistence but even more so to its neglect of affect.3 Even though dread is rare, it plays an important methodological role in the analysis of ex-sistence. o The rareness of dread indicates that my ex-sistence is mostly hidden from me due to absorption. That is why it takes dread to compel me to directly experience my ex-sistence.
22. Summary. Affect both permeates and reveals the three elements of involvement in meaning: the meaning-giving world, the self, and my involvement as such. Dread shows all that in a unique light by individualizing me down to my groundless core. By reducing me to my own self, dread wrenches me out of absorption and confronts me with the possibility of being authentic, + unhampered by the things that I normally cling to.
23. Transition to §41. We now have the experiential basis for answering the question of ex-sistence as a unified whole.
3. Fear and dread have played an important if limited role in Christian theology, which has not adequately distinguished between the two. This is especially the case when experiences of faith, sin, love, and repentance dominate the question of one’s relation to God. Take, for example, Augustine’s frequent discussions of timor castus and timor servilis [chaste fear and servile fear] and his doctrine of fear in general. For that, see De diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus [“Eighty-three questions on various topics”] (P.L. 7, 23 et seq.); question 33, “De metu” [On fear]; question 35, “Utrum non aliud amandum sit, quam metu carere” [Whether we should love anything other than freedom from fear]; and question 36, “Quid amandum sit” [What should we love?]. o
Luther discusses the question of fear in the context of poenitentia and contritio [penance and contrition], especially in his commentary on Genesis. While that text is not a highly theoretical treatment, its power lies in its spiritual edification. See his Ennarationes in genesin [1829], chapter 3, Werke (Erlangen edition) in his Exegetica opera latina, vol. I, 177 et seq. o
Kierkegaard’s “psychological” treatment of original sin has made the most progress in analyzing dread within a theological context. See his Der Begriff der Angst (1844), Gesammelte Werke (Diedrichs), vol. 5.