Heidegger's Weg/Da Game: Courage, Fear and Anxiety in Being and Time

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger claims that Dasein's fallenness (a state in which it does not appropriately determine itself) produces a lack of a proper world. This state manifests itself as the practical and theoretical reign of the anonymous ‘They’, the ‘Anyone’. But fallenness and the reign of the ‘anyone’ do  not present  themselves only as a peculiar lack of world (a transformation of the world into a mere environment).  They also paradigmatically and symptomatically appear  as an absence of what Heidegger calls ‘the courage to be anxious [ Mut zur Angst]’. The very existence of a world, thus, seems to depend on an audacious anxiety that undoes all certainties and stabilities. The article argues that having a world is only thinkable under the condition of a peculiar readiness to lose it, which Heidegger himself addressed as a Weg-Sein, a being-not-there. Losing the world – the right way – then becomes a condition of having one in the first place.