Heidegger maintained that the mood of anxiety reveals the nothingness lying at the heart of human existence. While contending that anxiety is perhaps the most basic human mood, he also observed that it is such a disquieting mood that we spend most of our lives trying to keep it from overtaking us. Our unreflective absorption in the practices of everyday life-family relations, schooling, job activities, entertainment- keep us distracted enough that we manage to conceal from ourselves the weirdness of being human. Anxiety tears us out of everyday absorption in things; it reveals them to be useless in the face of the radical mortality, finitude, and nothingness at the heart of human existence.
Why is human existence weird? Because humans are not things but the clearing in which things appear.
Why is human existence weird? Because humans are not things but the clearing in which things appear.
— Michael Zimmerman, “Heidegger, Buddhism, and Deep Ecology”
(Source: notpennysplane, via cerebralnausea-deactivated20121)
