In Being and Time, Heidegger developed his idea of angst, or anxiety, and how the totality of the world is exposed to the individual through it. Angst assists in revealing the nothing, because it, by its very nature, is undifferentiated. While fear is always fear of something or other, angst is a sense of dread that sets Da-sein aside from everything that is not itself. While experiencing angst, everything recedes from Da-sein such that we “can get no hold on things.”

After everything has receded away from awareness, Da-sein is confronted with the nothing. For this reason Heidegger states that “anxiety reveals the nothing.” We can come to an understanding that it is not “this thing or that” that made us anxious, but “that in the face of which and for which we were anxious was ‘properly’ – nothing.

Nothing is the word for an anxiety about something we cannot put our finger on---eg., the vague sense of emptiness that urban decay and de-industrialization causes. We sense a dark future; one that leaves us with a sense of powerlessness as we struggle to shrink back angst as the manufacturing industries go elsewhere. In this situation the routine course of our life is disrupted by calamities or inner doubt.

In Adelaide in the 1990s I saw the derelict buildings, empty building sites, closed y and boarded up shops and buildings. My taken-for-granted meaning of my life and world suddenly is shattered, and I realized that we in Adelaide had been hovering over an abyss all along. This negative presence expressed in derelict building sites indicate that global capital had gone elsewhere, and the city and buildings have gone downhill. What future for Adelaide as a place to live, given this tragic process of decay and a sense of loss?

So if nothingness is a negativity, then it is not something outside of everyday existence.

In the essay "What is Metaphysics?" written shortly after the publication of Being and Time Heidegger placed metaphysics in contrast to the outlook of modern science (deriving from Descartes) with its focus on the res extensa as an empirically given domain--and its consequent neglectof nothingness. "Nothingness," Heidegger observed, "is absolutely re-jected by science and abandoned as null and void"--which means that "science wishes to know nothing of nothing(ness). Traditional Western thought has tended to treat nothingness simply as negativity of a vacuum.

Nothingness was encountered in the state of "dread" (Angst), which was not equivalent to mere anxiety ornervousness, but rather meant a basic openness to nonbeing, that understood as a part of being. If nothingness is a negativity, then it is also intrinsic possibility and a defining character of human existence. Nothingness denotes neither a representational or conceptual entity nor apropositional denial; it is more a "nihilating" potency participating obliquely in the ongoing happening or disclosure of being.