The ‘nothing’ in Heidegger’s concept of anxiety: from groundlessness to presence

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper I explore the differences between how Martin Heidegger and Wouter Kusters understand the role that anxiety as an encounter with the nothing plays for the origin of philosophy. Despite an important overlap between Heidegger and Kusters on the critical distance they take from the discourse of psychology and psychiatry and their valuable attempt to de-psychologize the discourse around anxiety and prioritize its existential insights, I argue that Kusters’ view of the nothing primarily as groundlessness and, subsequently, the view that anxiety leads to philosophy through the route of extreme skepticism is at odds with Heidegger’s view that anxiety as an encounter with nothing reveals the world as a whole.