Free Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love by Giovanni Frazzetto Page B

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is the one who had the biggest impact on me. Heidegger is best known for having written Being and Time (1927), 21 which is considered one of the most influential works of philosophy of the twentieth century. The relevance of Heidegger’s thought to the understanding of emotions becomes apparent if we consider the distinction he makes between two main ways of looking at the world, for which he adopted two interesting and innovative terms: Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit. Vorhandenheit , which roughly translates as present-at-hand, is a theoretical understanding of reality. It is how we observe and theorize about things, and how we come to know facts about the world through disinterested examination – the way a scientist would. Zuhandenheit , or ready-to-hand, is about how we engage with the world – how we are connected to it through our interactions with objects and people in various circumstances. Heidegger accorded the latter greater power, which is to say that our experience of the world overshadows our scientific knowledge of it. It is what comes first, how we initially get to know the world. Likewise, one could say, our experience of our emotional life prevails over our theoretical grasp of it. Heidegger believed that science cannot fully grasp the lived experience of anxiety.
    The idea that anxiety and fear are distinct was clear to him. As he wrote, fear and anxiety are ‘kindred phenomena’ that are often mixed up, but need to be distinguished. Something threatening is ‘fearsome’ if it is encountered as a definite and real entity. By contrast, ‘that in the face of which one is anxious is completely indefinite’. Anxiety does not know what it is anxious about, because the threat is ‘nowhere’ in particular and has no identifiable source. 22
    Heidegger granted anxiety high importance. In much the same way that we need to be able to experience fear in the presence of real danger in order to survive, for Heidegger we need anxiety in order to ‘exist at all’ in the world. How is that? Daily we navigate in the world enmeshed in its net of things, people, actions and circumstances. We get up, take our kids to school, go to work, meet our colleagues and friends, go to the gym or the pub, plan a holiday, buy a new piece of furniture for our home, a new CD or the latest phone, and play with our iPad. We are completely absorbed by all this. Heidegger calls this absorption into the world ‘falling’. In simple terms, we ‘fall’ into our routines and, so doing, we tend to overlook, and to stop searching for, the authentic meaning of our lives. Lodged in the ‘inertia of falling’, we turn away from ourselves. We flee from a meaningful life, because it’s easier to do so. We repress anxiety, but ‘anxiety is there. It is only sleeping.’
    When it awakes, though, our symbiotic rapport with the world fades. In anxiety, those same things, circumstances and people in the world become irrelevant and disappear. Everything ‘sinks away’. Any previous connection with the world, and any interpretation of it, is put into doubt. It is no wonder that to convey the disquieting feeling of anxiety, Heidegger also used the word unheimlich , which means to be out of home, or ‘estranged’ from home. 23 In a bout of anxiety, we are forced to become more self-aware and, in so doing, we reconsider the importance of some of the things that we used to hold so dear and our engagement with them. We question ourselves. Anxiety discloses the world and our condition in it as they are, void of superfluous adornments.
    Our anxiety also connects to the future. We are human beings who exist in time, Heidegger insisted. Indeed, we are not anxious about what has happened, or what is about to happen. Instead we become anxious primarily about what may happen. Worry often creeps in when we think about the endless chances that we may or may not seize in life. Anxiety is rooted in the realization of our