Anxiety is not pathological but a mood that reveals the world as strange.

Evidence

The rest of the lecture compares nothingness and Being, and contains a long discussion of ‘moods’ - another of Heidegger’s key ideas. Dasein’s moods can range from elation to boredom, or perhaps the diffuse sense of oppression and unease described by Kierkegaard as Angst - dread, or anxiety. Each mood reveals the world in a different light. In anxiety, the world shows itself to me as something ‘uncanny’ - the German word unheimlich here literally meaning ‘not homely’. It reveals ‘the total strangeness of beings’. In this unhomely, unfamiliar moment, the mood of anxiety opens up the first questioning movement of philosophy - particularly that big question, which forms the climax of Heidegger’s lecture: ‘Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?’ — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 248

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Heidegger’s moods, Angst, and unheimlich (uncanny as literally ‘not homely’) as a cluster of key concepts.
• XREF: Unheimlich as ‘not homely’ resonates with Freud’s own use of the uncanny, and Kierkegaard’s Angst as the reader’s own orientation to existentialism. — connects to: Moral anxiety is intrinsic to existence, not imposed from outside; Menopause distress is produced by anxious consciousness, not the body — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1708; Heterophobia is anxiety seeking an object, not racism proper — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 187

Broader Connections

• Moral anxiety is intrinsic to existence, not imposed from outside #expands (0.85)
• Menopause distress is produced by anxious consciousness, not the body #contradicts (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1708
• Heterophobia is anxiety seeking an object, not racism proper #expands (0.78) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 187