…as he worked it out in "Being and Time," the mood of Angst is more fundamentally constitutive of Dasein than any other mood, and confronting and resolutely taking up Angst is a defining feature of authentic existence - Richard Capobianco
Anxiety is very important to existential philosophers. Heidegger brought it to the fore in his seminal work, ‘’Being and Time,’’ written in 1927. Anxiety is, he said, a primal or ‘’ontological’’ state of being. Everyone who takes birth is bound to experience it until they expire. One of the foremost caches of anxiety occurs during the process of protention – when we project our minds forward in time to the moment of death. Death, and the anxiety that arises when we think about it, deeply concern existential thinkers, such as Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, and many others who followed them.
Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one. - Martin Heidegger
In ‘’Being and Time,’’ Heidegger also stated that anxiety arises in a person, due to what he called their ‘’Thrownness.’’ This strange word alludes to the state we find ourselves in when we, at a young age, find ourselves embedded in a world we did not create. It is a strange fact that we simply find ourselves to be, what Heidegger calls, ‘’Beings-in-the-World.’’ We did not choose our parents, or other family members. We did not choose to be English, German, French or American. We did not choose to be fat or thin, tall or short, intelligent or stupid, handsome or ugly. In fact, we did not even choose to live. The whole thing has been foisted upon us, and part of us is highly disturbed about it.