flight from itself. This phenomenon of dread is not something invented by me but has already been seen repeatedly, even though not in these concepts. Here I am only trying to provide the concepts for things which are usually treated in a nebulous way in the sciences, and at times also in theology.
Augustine did not regard the phenomenon of dread in a thematic way, but he in fact caught a glimpse of it in a short study "On Fear" within a collection of questions, "On Various Questions of the Eighty Tribes."4 Luther then dealt with the phenomenon of dread in the traditional context of an interpretation of contritio and poenitentia in his commentary on Genesis.5 In recent times, particularly in connection with the problem of original sin, Kierkegaard made the phenomenon of dread the theme of his separate work, The Concept of Dread.6
I cannot go into greater detail here into the various modifications whereby dread as implicit is directly concealed by the phenomenon of being afraid. We shall consider them in the persistent retrograde movement from discoveredness towards falling. From falling to dread we now come to the last fundament of being, which gives to dread in general, which means to being-in-the-world, its original constitution. This fundament is the phenomenon of care.
The explication of the movement of falling as a flight of Dasein from itself led to the phenomenon of dread as a basic disposition of Dasein to itself, namely, to itself in its pure being, where being must always be taken in the sense already exhibited as being-in-the-world. The foregoing reflections on dread which we have just cited suffer from the basic deficiency of not really seeing the conceptual, existential structure of Dasein, so that dread then becomes a psychological problem, even in Kierkegaard. But dread is dread of this being itself, such that this being-in-dread-of-it is a being in dread about this being. But this implies that Dasein is an entity for which in its being, in its being-in-the-world, "it goes about its very being" [es geht urn sein Sein selbst], for which, that is, its very being is at issue. This is the sense of the selfsameness
4· Augustine, De diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus, questions 33, 34, 35, Opera Omnia, Migne, Patrologiae Latinae XL, Vol. VI, pp. 22ff.
5. Martin Luther, Enarrationes in genesin, Ch. 3, Werke (Erlangen Edition), Exegetica opera latina, Vol. I, pp. 177fT.
6. Soren Kierkegaard, Der Begriff der Angst, 1844, Gesammelte Werke (Diederichs), Vol. 5.