but if it is still far off it remains veiled in its fearsome nature. As something approaches in nearness, however, what is harmful is threatening, it can get us, and yet perhaps not. In approaching, this [141] "it can and yet in the end it may not" gets worse. It is fearsome, we say.
6. This means that what is harmful, approaching near, bears the revealed possibility of not happening and passing us by. This does not lessen or extinguish fearing, but enhances it.
Fearing itself frees what we have characterized as threatening in a way which lets us be concerned with it. It is not that we initially· ascertain a future evil (malum futurum) and then are afraid of it. But neither does fearing first confirm something approaching us, rather it discovers it beforehand in its fearsomeness. And then fear, in being afraid, can "clarify" what is fearsome by explicitly looking at it. Circumspection sees what is fearsome because it is in the attunement of fear. As a dormant possibility of attuned being-in-the-world, fearing, "fearfulness" has already disclosed the world with regard to the fact that something like a fearful thing can draw near to us from this fearfulness. The ability to draw near is itself freed by the essential, existential spatiality of being-in-the-world.
The about which [Worum] fear is afraid is the fearful being itself, Dasein. Only a being which is concerned in its being about that being can be afraid. Fearing discloses this being in its jeopardization, in its being left to itself. Although it does so in varying degrees of explicitness, fear always reveals Dasein in the being of its there. When we are afraid for house and home, this is not a counter-example for the above determination of what it is we are fearful about. For as being-in-the-world, Dasein is always a heedful being-with. Initially and for the most part, Dasein is in terms of what it takes care of. The jeopardization of that is a threat to being with. Fear predominantly discloses Dasein in a privative way. It bewilders us and makes us "lose our heads." At the same time that fear closes off our jeopardized being-in it lets us see it, so that when fear has subsided Dasein has to first find its way about again.
Fear about, as being afraid of, always equiprimordially discloses—whether privatively or positively—innerworldly beings in their possibility of being threatening and being-in with regard to its being threatened. Fear is a mode of attunement.
But fearing about can also involve others, and we then speak of fearing for them. This fear for ... does not take away the other's fear from him. That is out of the question because the other for whom we are afraid does not even have to be afraid on his part. We are afraid for the other most of all precisely when he is not afraid and blunders recklessly into what is threatening. Fearing for ... is a mode of [142]