Anxiety and Existential Homelessness

Heidegger inquired into the nature of "Being" itself, without regard to time and place. Therefore his masterwork Being and Time has traditionally and fruitfully been read as an inquiry into the fundamental structures of the human condition as such, not relating to any specific set of cultural conditions. However, every work is a product of a historical context. This is an issue that has become increasingly acute in the field of Heidegger studies, since Heidegger's Nazism became a matter of public record in the late l980's. Heidegger's magnum opus can be read both as an analysis of the structure of the human condition itself, and (though he would vigorously protest against this reading) as a work which subtly reflects a profound cultural crisis.

Heidegger's analytic of anxiety is discussed in connection with the contingency of human life and its inevitable confrontation with death. How is such anxiety in itself part of a larger discourse of melancholy? According to Heidegger, anxiety is not something that can be overcome - contrary to the teachings of many therapeutic and religious systems offering freedom from anxiety, or inner peace. This is because it is a fundamental structure of the human condition. Man is the only creature on Earth (as far as we know) who must live with and come to grips with his finitude. Anxiety is not "fear" (which has as its object a specific concrete threat), but rather is characterized as a free-floating "uncanny-ness". This anxiety has as its object no specific thing in the world; rather its object is being-in-the world as such. I have been thrown into the world, certain only of my own finitude. Heidegger uses the German term "unheimlich", to describe the feeling of anxiety, which literally means "unhomelike" or a sense of "not-being- at-home". Authentic being can only come out of a process of confronting and accepting my death as my "ownmost" possibility (that can belong only to me alone) and my "uttermost" possibility (for there may in fact be nothing whatsoever after death).

Anxiety was discussed extensively by Kierkegaard, Freud and others; the focus on analyses of anxiety in European thought during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was implicitly engendered by the subversive nature of philosophy itself, from the early modern period onwards. How does a society properly function when, in John Donne's words, "a new philosophy calls all in doubt"?

    And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
    The element of fire is quite put out,
    The sun is lost, and th' earth, and no man's wit
    Can well direct him where to look for it.
    And freely men confess that this world's spent,
    When in the planets and the firmament
    They seek so many new; they see that this
    Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
    "Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone…
    (John Donne An Anatomy of the World; The First Anniversary).

Paradoxically, the philosopher whose method consisted primarily of "calling all into doubt" was the founder of modern philosophy, Descartes. Although much of Heidegger's Being and Time constitutes a refutation of Descartes' rationalism, the two philosophers share commonalities regarding the original impetus for their respective lines of questioning. Descartes' quest for certainty and his methodological process of "calling all into doubt" seem pathological to the contemporary reader if studied (as it often is) divorced from cultural context. It becomes fully intelligible only when one considers the scientific revolution's radical questioning of many of Europe's basic assumptions. Descartes' philosophical methodology "called all into doubt" because he was delineating exactly what he could know for certain in a world which now seemed uncertain indeed.

Heidegger's emphasis on "not-being-at-home" can also be read as a reaction to the spiritual dislocation of Europe reflected in nineteenth century philosophy and letters, culminating in the period between the World Wars. Heidegger also wrote extensively on Nietzsche and European nihilism, the horrible implications of which Nietzsche so presciently foresaw. But I will argue that even in Being and Time, awork thatimplicitly reflects the cultural crisis which Nietzsche diagnosed, Heidegger is searching for solidity in an increasingly fragmented world. When basic cultural presuppositions are suddenly revealed to be inadequate, anxiety and melancholy may be the only possible authentic responses. The upheavals of interwar Germany reflected the loss of the solidity of many traditional cultural presuppositions. Heidegger's conservatism may be explainable, at least in part, as a reaction to this loss. Heidegger's attachment to the land and to the lifestyle of the peasantry also needs to be considered in this context. His nationalism and even his involvement with National Socialism can be better understood (though certainly not morally justified in the latter case) by viewing his philosophical project at least partly as an attempt to find "roots" and "ground" in the face of the profoundly felt loss of yesterday's world.