He develops his account of (attunement) in §30 by way of the example of fear. Now, it is always unclear, when confronting an example, how much to generalize from it, and Heidegger does not go out of his way to help us here. I shall in effect take a stand on that question by choosing to focus on the two dominant features of fear: that it has an object (the fearsome), and that it has a self-regarding element as well. Heidegger calls these two items the fear’s “in-the-face-of-which” and its “about-which.”
The In-the-Face-of Which of Fear. The in-the-face-of-which of fear is the object or item that one fears, say, the oncoming car as Jones stands in the middle of the boulevard:
(47) The in-the-face-of-which of fear, the “fearsome,” is always an intraworldly encountering (entity) of the sort of being of the available, the occurrent, or Dasein-with (Mitdasein). . . . The in-the-face-of-which of fear has the character of being threatening. (SZ:140)
Heidegger proceeds with a rather detailed analysis of fearsome items, which is not really to our point. The basic idea is that the attunement reveals an entity in the environment (an intraworldly entity) as fearsome, as being threatening. This fearsome thing is in the environment; it could be a bit of paraphernalia (the oncoming car), a natural thing (a fire), or a person (a mugger). It is not Dasein itself. Heidegger explicitly does not include that category with the others. It is not clear, however, whether this is an artifact of the example, fear, or a general feature of attunement. One would hope the former, because there do appear to be attunements that can take Dasein as their object: love and hatred, for example, which can take the forms of self-hatred and self-love.
Attunement reveals that intraworldly item as bearing an import for Dasein. When Heidegger explains that fear reveals the fearsome as threatening, he is suggesting that the fearsome is significant, makes a difference to Dasein, for this reason. He elaborates the point thus:
Circumspectively concernful letting-encounter has — as we can now see more sharply on the basis of affectivity — the character of being touched (Betroffenwerdens) But being touched by the unserviceability, resistance, threateningness of what is available is ontologically possible only by being-in’s being so determined in advance that intraworldly encountering (entities) can matter to it. This ability to have things matter to Dasein is grounded in affectivity, as which it has disclosed the world, for example, in terms of threatenability. (SZ:137)
(48) Attunement reveals the imports of things, they way they touch Dasein. A car is not just something with which to drive, a means of transportation. Instead, a car is also (all too often) something threatening. The plate on Jones’s shelf is not just something with which to serve food, but also importantly something of familial value, something cherished. The overused joke that Heidegger describes the world in chapter 3 of division 1 of Being and Time as one large gas station hits an important nerve of truth about that chapter. Chapter 3 presents the world simply as a set of use-objects, things to be manipulated to complete certain tasks, so that Dasein can be the sort of person it projects itself to be. Heidegger did not, in fact, think of the world that way. In chapter 3 his main purpose is to exhibit certain aspects of the world that undermine several important traditional theses: that the world is a totality of interacting substances (which is undermined by the purposively functional, essential interrelation of paraphernalia); that the world is known by means of cognition (which is undermined by the precognitive, circumspective character of Dasein’s intelligent navigation through the world); and, thus, that Dasein is primarily a knower who stores up information and theories about the world (which is undermined by seeing that the world is not merely an object of belief or theory, and that Dasein is primarily a skilled agent). He accomplishes these goals by means of focusing on the side of Dasein’s familiarity with the world that is found in its embodied competences. The onesidedness of this description is corrected in §29. Intraworldly things have imports; they matter to Dasein.
What Fear Fears about. Dasein does not frighten itself, it is not the in-the-face-of-which of fear, but Dasein does fear about itself: “That about which fear fears is the fearful entity itself, Dasein” (SZ:141). There is a straightforward way in which this claim is quite clear. Jones fears the car as she stands in the middle of the boulevard, and she fears about herself, about her safety and physical integrity. Her fear has an “object” (the fearsome, the car), which is not she, yet that fear is nonetheless “self-regarding”: it is a fear on behalf of her safety, her life. The road to generalizing Heidegger’s account is somewhat complex in virtue of aspects of the phenomena that Heidegger himself spells out. Initially it may seem that Jones herself need not be the person about whom she fears. After all, can she not fear about or for her friend Smith as he stands in the (49) road? In fact, Heidegger identifies three phenomenologically distinct cases here:
But fearing-for can also concern others, and in such cases we speak of fearing for them. This fearing for . . . does not catch fear from the other. That is already out of the question in so far as the other, for whom we fear, need not on his side fear at all. We fear for the other mostly precisely when he does not fear for himself and foolhardily throws himself up against what threatens him. (SZ:141-2)
In this case, Jones fears for someone who does not fear about or for himself. She sees Smith in the middle of the road, blithely reading the newspaper as BMWs rush by. Smith is so absorbed in the reading that he has not noticed the cars; or perhaps he is from New York and does not fear cars in the way thatjones does. Here the fearing is all “on her side.” In a stronger case, only hinted at in Heidegger’s term “fearing with” (Sichmitfürchten), Jones and Smith can fear with each other for him: they look at each other and share a fearful glance as Smith stands in the middle of the street. Here the fearing is “on both sides,” but the life feared for is still his; she is safe on the sidewalk. Finally, there is an even stronger case, perhaps hinted at in Heidegger’s term “fearing along with one another” (Miteinanderfürchten): Jones and Smith are stuck together on the yellow line, having made together the ill-advised attempt to cross the street. They fear along with each other for their lives. The fearing is “on both sides,” and both lives are feared for. Still, she does fear for his life (and he for hers), and thus this is a case of the fearing for another that Heidegger is interested in.
In both of the first two cases, although it may seem at first that Jones only fears for another, and not for or about herself, Heidegger wants to argue that in fearing for Smith she is also fearing about herself:
One can fear for . . . , without fearing (for) oneself. Precisely speaking, however, fearing-for… is indeed a fearing (about) oneself One’s being-with (50) the other, which could be ripped from one, is also “feared” (about). (SZ:142)
Jones fears for Smith, rather than simply apprehends that he could very well presently lose his life, because Jones stands in a relation (being-with) to Smith and cares about him. Now, this need not be a terribly emotional thing; Smith need not be a friend. Only a very thin and diffuse care is required. It is in virtue of this diffuse, solicitous being-with that Jones fears for the other. Conversely, if she loathes Smith completely, she may very well see his being stranded in the middle of the boulevard as an opportunity rather than a threat, and thus not fear at all, but rather excitedly hope for his demise. So fearing for the other requires Jones to fear about her being-with him.
Heidegger makes a correlative point about cases in which Jones fears not for another, but to use Heidegger’s example, “for house and home”:
When we fear for house and home, we find no counterexample for the determination above of the about-which of fear (i.e., for the thesis that Dasein always fears about itself). For Dasein is in each case, as being-in-the-world, concernful being-amidst. Primarily and usually Dasein is in terms of what it is concernful about. Its imperilment is a threat to being-amidst. (SZ:141)
As the fire approaches her house, Jones fears the fire (it is the fearsome), and she fears for her house. She may be far away, in a hotel in the next town, utterly safe. Still, she fears for her house. This is possible, Heidegger argues, because she is essentially “being-amidst,” she is essentially engaged with the things of her environment. She fears for the house, because she cares about the house. She cares about the house as a way of being amidst it. This fearing for the house is not based on an egocentric and materialistic thing-lust; rather, it reveals to her about herself that she values the house and her being amidst it. Fearing for house and home, as (51) well as fearing for others, involves a self-revelation, a disclosure of oneself as caring about things in some definite way.
The attunement of fear not only reveals a fearsome object, and not only sometimes involves another person or thing feared for, but also always discloses something about the fearful one, something that is “feared about.” In the case of fearing for others, Jones’s being-with them is feared about and can be seen to be a deeper ground that makes the fear possible. When she fears “for herself,” when she is stranded in the middle of the boulevard, she clearly fears about her own safety. This fear discloses the way in which certain aspects of herself matter to her. Now, the phraseology (“certain aspects of herself mattering to her”) makes the whole affair sound rather selfish, or at least egocentrically self-regarding. But that is not the point at all. If she were indifferent to her being with Smith, then she would not fear for Smith. Of course, it does not follow that her fear for Smith is a self-absorbed fear. It simply must be grounded in the way her relationship to Smith matters to her. Moreover, Heidegger is not arguing that Jones is only motivated by self-regarding facts. Yet he is making a claim about motivation, and in exploring it, we shall further illuminate his conception of attunement.
]