Buren (GA63:nota 17) – Bekümmerung (”worry”)

Heidegger had been using the homey but dumsy technical term Bekümmerung (”worry”) since around 1920. See “Anmerkungen an Karl Jaspers   Psychologie der Weltanschauungen,” in Wegmarken  , pp. 5ff.; translated as “Comments on Karl Jaspers  ’s Psychology of Worldviews,” trans. John van Buren  , in Pathmarks, pp. 4ff. This term is most clearly defined in Heidegger’s 1922 essay on Aristotle  ; ‘Worry refers not to a mood in which we wear a woebegone expression, but rather to a factical being-resolved, i.e., seizing upon our existence … as something we are and will be concerned about. . . . worry is the care of existence (gen. ob. [objective genitive]).’ See “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles  ,” p. 243. In the present section of Heidegger’s course, Bekümmerung is used not only in connection with Dasein’s “caring”’ (Sorgen) about itself (i.e., about its “existence” or “possibility”) and with its “unrest” (Unruhe), but also in connection with its “wakefulness for itself,” a phrase which occurs in the preceding paragraph and is in §26 contrasted to the “carefreeness” in which “care is asleep.” However, in this course Heidegger is already in the process of replacing Bekümmerung with the perhaps less clumsy and more sophisticated Kierkegaardian term Angst (”anxiety” or “anxiousness”), which eventually becomes a central term in Being and Time  . Bekümmerung and the adjective bekümmert (see section VI of the Appendix) each occur only once in this course and are translated as “worry” and “worried” respectively. Other possible translations of Bekümmerung include “being troubled,” “being disturbed,” “concern,” “distress,” and “anxiousness.” However, “anxious” has been reserved for translating Besorgnis, an intensive form of Besorgen (”concern,” “being concerned about and attending to”) which Heidegger uses in §§21 and 26 to describe Dasein’s being “anxiously concerned” or “worried” about itself in a “worldly” manner. Besorgnis has accordingly been rendered not just as “concern,” which for Heidegger means concern about the world, but more strongly as “anxious concern and its apprehensions,” since this rendition suggests the “intensity” (p. 72) of concern and the involvement of the self which Heidegger intends. Note that the etymological connection between Besorgen and Besorgnis, on the one hand, and Sorgen and Sorge, on the other, is lost in my respective translations of the latter terms as “caring” and “care.” “To distress” and “to disturb” were reserved for translating Bedrängnis (”distress,” “something distressing”), stören (”to disturb”), and Störbarkeit (”disturbability”), terms which Heidegger employs in §§2 5-26 to describe the “awakening” of the ‘carefreeness’ in which “care is asleep.” Regarding “anxious concern and its apprehensions,” “concern,” and “care,” see also endnotes 62 and 75.