In modern times the Romantics were certainly preoccupied with diffuse feelings of searching longing and pleasurable reminiscence.

But it was only in 1844, when Kierkegaard published The Concept of Anxiety, that the intentionlessness of mood was made explicit and put to philosophical use. This anxiety would in the twentieth century become what might be called its paradigm mood. Kierkegaard, observing that the concept of anxiety is ignored in psychology, says that “it is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that referred to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of a possibility”. “Freedom’s actuality” describes a presentiment of a capability—an as yet unfixed sense of a freedom to be free. This was Adam’s condition before the Fall, a “dreaming” state of innocence, before he knew the difference between good and evil. In that dream state of uneasy repose, Adam has “indeed nothing against which to strive.” At this point Kierkegaard has recourse to the verbal trick that will have great consequences in Existential philosophy: The “nothing” which Adam has to strive against in the mood of dreaming anxiety turns into an intentional object. “But what effect does nothing have?” Kierkegaard asks. “It begets anxiety.” Thus the inherited sinfulness of the human race originating in Adam’s fall is conditioned not, as in the tradition, on the perversion of the will, the rational faculty of desire, but on a mood, an affective sense of the freedom to be possibly bad.

Heidegger adapts for his essay this Kierkegaardian transmutation of the nothing that anxiety “is about” into a meta-physical Nothing. The mood (in German Stimmung, “attunement”) of anxiety opens the human being to Nothing. In their uncanny alienated indifference to existence, beings as a whole distance themselves from us. The human foothold in existence is gone. Anxiety is revealingly about the Nothing that environs existence. Thus anxiety becomes our access to the wonder of beings. We realize, we feel, that they are something and not nothing: Anxiety is the fundamental metaphysical feeling.

¶ 8:06 AM