heidegger on anxiety

I picked up a Heidegger book I've carried with me since my undergrad days and found some passages on axiety underlined. I don't recall underlining them, but I must have found that they spoke to the metaphysical anxieties that tend to underlie my panic attacks -- because they feel absolutely relevant right now. From 'What is Metaphysics?' . . .

Anxiety is indeed anxiety in the face of . . ., but not in the face of this or that thing. Anxiety in the face of . . . is always anxiety for . . ., but not for this or that. The interminateness of that in the face of which and for which we become anxious is no mere lack of determination but rather the essential impossibility of determining it. In a familiar phrase this indeterminateness comes to the fore.

[ . . .]

What is "it" that makes one feel ill at ease? We cannot say what it is before which one feels ill at ease. As a whole it is so for one. All things and we ourselves sink into indifference. This, however, not in the sense of mere disappearance. Rather, in this very receding things turn toward us. The receding of beings as a whole that closes in on us in anxiety oppresses us. We can get no hold on things. In the slipping away of beings only this "no hold on things" comes over us and remains.

Anxiety reveals the nothing.

We "hover" in anxiety. More precisely, anxiety leaves us hanging because it induces the slipping away of beings as a whole. This implies that we ourselves - we humans who are in being - in the midgst of beings slip away from ourselves. At bottom therefore it is not as though "you" or "I" feel ill at ease; rather it is this way for some "one". In the altogether unsettline experience of this hovering where there is nothing to hold onto, pure Da-sein is all that is still there.

Anxiety robs us of speech. Because beings as a whole slip away, so that just the nothing crowds rounds, in the face of anxiety all utterance of the "is" falls silent.

[ . . . ]

The nothing reveals itself in anxiety - but not as a being. Just as little is it given as an object. Anxiety is no kind of grasping of the nothing. All the same, the nothing reveals itself in and through anxiety [ . . .] in axneity the nothing is encoutered at one with beings as a whole.

[ . . . ]

The nothing itself does not attract; it is essentially repelling. But this repulsion is itself such a parting gesture toward beings that are submerging as a whole. This wholly repelling gesture toward beings are in retreat as a whole, which is the action of the nothing that oppresses Dasein in anxiety, is the essence of the nothing: nihilation.

[ . . .] as the repelling gesture toward the reteating whole of beings, [nihilation] discolses these beings in their full but heretofore concealed strangeness as what is radically other - with respect to the nothing.

In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings - and not nothing. [ . . .] The essence of the originally nihilating nothing lies in this, that is brings Da-sein for the first time before beings as such.

[ . . .]

Da-sein means: being held out into the nothing.

Holding itself out into the nothing, Dasein is in each case already beyond beings as a whole. This being beyond beings we call "transcendence." If in the ground of its essence Dasein were not transcending, which now means, if it were not in advance holding itself out into the nothing, then it could never be related to beings nor even to itself.

Without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom.

[ . . .]

Only because the nothing is manifest in the ground of Dasein can the total strangeness of beings overwhelm us. Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder. Only in the ground of wonder - the revelation of the nothing - does the "why?" loom before us.

[ . . .]

The question of the nothing puts us, the questions, in question.