Despite being the precise opposite of anxiety, hope structurally resembles it, because – like anxiety but unlike fear, which always involves a concrete feared object – hope is without an object.1 Anxiety relates to something altogether indeterminate. Anxiety concerns being-in-the-world as such. This indeterminacy is precisely what gives it its intensity. The object of hope, the spes qua, also escapes any concrete conceptualization. Hope fundamentally attunes [be-stimmt] our being. Like anxiety, it can therefore be understood as a fundamental mode of being, that is, as an existential.
