The paper considers the phenomenological analyses of anxiety (Angst) and fear (Furcht) found in Heidegger’s Being and Time. In his work Heidegger considers these moods as the conditions of possibility of everydayness. He claims that anxiety is a mood which, in a latent manner, constantly determines everydayness; however, he does not explicitly clarify the meaning of mood having a “latent” form. The paper argues for the thesis that Heidegger considered “being latent” in terms of the structure of forgetting, which is characteristic to everydayness; the paper investigates the means of everyday forgetting described in Being and Time. The first part of the paper briefly discusses Heidegger’s conception of everydayness. The second part interprets the mood of fear as a primary mode of everyday forgetting and explicates the structure of fear as a self-forgetting participation in everyday concerns. In the third part, three main characteristics of everydayness – idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity – are presented as a means of everyday forgetting. In the course of the analysis, everydayness is revealed as a twofold structure of forgetting.

The paper considers two problems related to the interpretation of S. Kierkegaard’s conception of Angest. Firstly, a tendency to interpret Kierkegaard’s Angest as a “fear without an object” and to posit its similarity to Heidegger’s Angst is put in question. Questioning this interpretation, an analysis of The Concept of Anxiety is undertaken, in order to reveal ambivalence as the primary feature of Kierkegaard’s conception of Angest. Secondly, the question of translating Angest into Lithuanian is addressed, criticizing the established tradition of translating Angest as “baimė” (fear) and supporting translator’s I. Tomaševičiūtė’s choice of “nerimas”. The aforementioned ambivalence of Angest serves as the basis for the critique, revealing Angest as a paradoxical attraction to that, which frightens. The first part of the paper expounds on the moment of ambivalence in the descriptions of Angest, found in The Concept of Anxiety. The second part compares and underlines the differences between the philosophical approaches of Kierkegaard and Heidegger. It is shown that Kierkegaard’s attention to the ambivalence of Angest is related to the practical bent of Kierkegaard’s philosophy and the problematics of personal individuation.

The Conception of Anxiety in Existential Philosophy (S. Kierkegaard, M. Heidegger) and Existential Psychology (R. May, E. Spinelli)