Your passage is already doing something rich: it’s staging fear and anxiety as ontological moods, and then showing how modernity tries to domesticate them by reframing them as “preferences,” “interests,” or “wants.” It resonates with ongoing critiques of liberal (and other kinds of) instrumentalization and the violence of turning existential conditions into consumer‑choices.

A few threads open up naturally from what you’ve written.

Fear as the specific

Fear, in your framing, is always tied to a determinate object. A spider. A cliff edge. A predator. Something that announces destruction. Fear is prophetic: it points to a possible future catastrophe that is already inscribed in the object. The cliff edge is not just a height; it is the promise of falling.

This is close to Heidegger’s distinction between Furcht (fear) and Angst (anxiety), but you’re giving it a more metaphysical twist: fear is the world revealing itself as threatening in a particular direction.

Anxiety as the total

Anxiety, by contrast, is not about a thing. It is about the structure of existence itself. It is the collapse of the distinction between possibility and actuality, or the hypertrophy of one at the expense of the other.

You describe anxiety as:

• possibility without ingress (pure openness with no foothold)

• actuality without openness (pure facticity with no escape)

• a world where Being is present but beings are not

• a world where beings are present but Being is not

This is beautifully put. It captures the way anxiety is not “about” anything but is instead a distortion of the very conditions that make “aboutness” possible.

Your phrase “anxiety is height itself or being imprisoned in height” is especially striking. It suggests that anxiety is not a reaction to a situation but the ontological saturation of a situation—its becoming inescapable, total, absolute.

Modernity’s repackaging

Your critique of liberal doctrine and eugenic modernity is incisive: the transformation of existential moods into “preferences” is part of a broader project of instrumentalizing the world.

This is not to deny that people suffer—only to note that modernity insists on translating existential suffering into administrative categories.

You’re pointing to the violence of that translation.

Kierkegaard and Becker: the infinite vs. the finite

Kierkegaard’s claim that despair is inevitable because humans cannot balance the infinite and the finite fits perfectly into your structure. Anxiety is the mood in which this imbalance becomes unbearable. Becker’s “transcendent” then becomes a kind of existential prosthesis: a way of orienting oneself toward something that is not reducible to the mundane or the measurable. But you’re not using Becker sentimentally. You’re using him to show that the human need for the transcendent is not a psychological quirk but a structural response to the impossibility of reconciling:

• the dizzying openness of possibility

• the crushing weight of actuality

Anxiety is what happens when these two poles lose their rhythm.

Where this leads

Your passage is circling a deeper claim:

Anxiety is a revelation of the structure of Being.

And modernity’s attempt to domesticate it through the language of “preferences”—is part of a larger metaphysical project to deny the tragic dimension of existence.

You’re also hinting at something else:

that anxiety is not merely unpleasant but metaphysically informative.

It reveals the abyss beneath the everyday.

If you want, we can push this further into:

• Heidegger’s Angst as the disclosure of the nothing

• Sartre’s nausea as the collapse of essence into existence

• Lacan’s anxiety as the signal of the Real

• or even your own ongoing work on metaphysical violence and the collapse of categories

Just tell me which direction you want to take this.

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