s, Heidegger locates the uncovering of Dasein in the attunement of anxiety. Through his analysis of anxiety as a state-of-mind that provides the phenomenal basis for explicitly grasping Daseins primordial totality of beings, Being, Heidegger reveals Being through the nothing. This is what is meant by [h]uman existence [Dasein] can relate to beings only if it hold itself out into the nothing (109), and that is why Heidegger defines Dasein to mean being held into the nothing (103). Anxiety is our experience of the slipping away of beings as a whole, the bringing of the nothing into the foreground, its uncovering. Anxiety is what makes fear possible. Yet, unlike fear, in which that which threatens is other than Dasein, anxiety is characterized by the fact that what threatens is nowhere and nothing. In anxiety, first and foremost, the world as world is disclosed as that which one cannot slip into, as the totality of beings slip away. As the totality of beings slip away from man, anxiety discloses these beings in their full but heretofore concealed strangeness as what is radically other (103). The importance of nothing is thus manifest. Nothing and Being is shown to be the same. It is the nothing that brings forth Being. This accounts for why Heidegger describes the concealment as characterized by strangeness as opposed to fear or horror. Although Being has been concealed, it is still and has always been present. One finds it strange, but not terrifying, because one has felt its presence all along without being conscious of it. Man feels anxiety as a kind of bewildered calm because the slipping away of beings brings man back the original, concealed Being. In its tranquility, the attunement of anxiety allows Dasein to compare itself with everything only to realize that there is nothing, and that is Being. Anxiety becomes a way for Dasein to understand itself in an authentic disclosure of itself. Anxiety reveals to Dasein that in the absence ...
