The German term “Angst” is often left untranslated in the English translations of and commentaries on Heidegger’s works. Some translations and commentaries prefer the term “anguish”; some use the term “dread”; and some employ the term “anxiety” in a non-medical sense.
Apart from the different translations of the German term “Angst”, in the thinking-philosophizing of Heidegger, especially in Being and Time, Angst is a mood that individualizes Dasein. Angst individualizes Dasein by proving to Dasein that social relations and already determined roles can never make available and secured whole and final accounts of identity concerning Dasein’s being in the world. Angst forces Dasein out of its familiar ways of being in the world with the “They”.
According to Heidegger, Angst brings Dasein face to face with the realization that neither pre-determined customs nor dominant and accepted social norms can make existence and life meaningful, and thereby opens up the potential residing in Dasein’s being in such a way that reveals the world to Dasein.
Angst individualizes Dasein by orienting it toward the potential residing in its own being because it deprives Dasein’s world of its familiarity, normality, and clarity. In Angst, all of Dasein’s familiar relations to the world undergo a sudden disruption from which they arise insignificant.
By encountering its own thrownness into the world and finite existence in the world, Dasein undergoes a dramatic and existential individualization by Angst in which Dasein experiences radical homelessness in the world; that is, a moment at which the world stops offering itself to Dasein as a home.
Individualization means forcing Dasein to leave behind and abandon the “They” by questioning itself and its own specific being in the world. Angst thus individualizes Dasein by revealing its own possibilities in its own being in the world.
Although Angst reveals that which belongs to Dasein as its own, it destructs the possibility that there might be existing what is really Dasein’s own concerning itself and its self. For what is really made apparent through Angst is nothingness. Nothingness means that Angst reveals Dasein to itself as having nothing as its own in the sense that all possibilities are available for the “They”, lacking all uniqueness and every specificity.
Nothing specifically meaningful or uniquely purposeful links together any specific Dasein with the available possibilities in the world. Only predetermined customs and governed ways of thinking link together any Dasein with the available possibilities in the world.
The result is thus uncanniness, pervading and deciding the things and possibilities offering themselves to Dasein, and therefore calling forth an awareness in Dasein that it is free to take up such possibilities either authentically or inauthentically.