Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2020
Since the first descriptions of anxiety, it has been related with temporality and in particular with the dimension of future. Thus, we already find anxiety defined as a general feeling of threatening (from the future) in the German mystic Jakob Boehme (1575–1634). He also used the image of “the wheel of anxiety”, with which he refers to its probable origin in a conflict between two forces which tend to separate themselves and are not able to do it, as a result from this centrifugal rotation movement of a wheel. This image also has a temporal character. In Kierkegaard, we read that “anxiety is always related with the future… and when we are disturbed by the past we are basically projecting toward the future…” In Heidegger's masterpiece, “Being and Time”, there is a chapter dedicated to the temporality of Befindlichkeit, and in particular to anxiety. Fear and anxiety have their roots, according to Heidegger, in the past, but their relation with the future makes them different: anxiety arises from the future as possibility, while fear arises from the lost present. In this paper, we try to make a contribution to the phenomenology of temporality (and of spatiality) of anxiety in relation with the analysis of a concrete anxiety experience: flight phobia. The analysis allows us to show both the desolation and narrowing of anxiety space, and with respect to temporality, the disappearance of every plan (the future), of every history (the past), and the reduction of the present to a succession of mere punctualities, behind which there arises, threatening, the nothingness itself.
The author has not supplied his declaration of competing interest.
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
Comments
No Comments have been published for this article.