Martin Heidegger
Anxiety is the noumena, the signified of the nothing. Doubt turned upon itself denies the genuine basis of nothing, instead placing something, a vacant spaceholder which itself is the construct it attempts to diagnose.
Anxiety robs us of speech. Because beings as a whole slip away, so that just the nothing crowds round, in the face of anxiety all utterance of the "is" falls silent. That in the malaise of anxiety we often try to shatter the vacant stillness with compulsive talk only proves the prescence of the nothing. That anxiety reveals the nothing man himself immediately demonstrates when anxiety has dissolved. In the lucid vision sustained by fresh remembrance we must say that that in the face of which and for which we were anxious was "properly"-nothing. Indeed: the nothing itself - as such - was there.
With the fundamental mood of anxiety we have arrived at that occurence in human existence in which the nothing is revealed and from which it must be interrogated.
Anxiety robs us of speech. Because beings as a whole slip away, so that just the nothing crowds round, in the face of anxiety all utterance of the "is" falls silent. That in the malaise of anxiety we often try to shatter the vacant stillness with compulsive talk only proves the prescence of the nothing. That anxiety reveals the nothing man himself immediately demonstrates when anxiety has dissolved. In the lucid vision sustained by fresh remembrance we must say that that in the face of which and for which we were anxious was "properly"-nothing. Indeed: the nothing itself - as such - was there.
With the fundamental mood of anxiety we have arrived at that occurence in human existence in which the nothing is revealed and from which it must be interrogated.