Fear of the Past

2.1. Fear as Experience of Dangerousness

First of all, let us quickly clarify what we have in mind when we talk about fear. In our ordinary language, we commonly use expressions such as ‘fear’ or ‘being afraid of’ in many different contexts to refer to or express various things—not all of them are relevant to our present discussion. For example, if a last-minute complication shows up that will make it difficult for you to be at the dinner scheduled for later this evening at a friend’s, you will probably apologize and say something like: ‘I am so sorry, I am afraid I won’t be able to make it for dinner tonight.’ While this is a perfectly acceptable way of talking, it is not a way to inform your friend on your being frightened—at least in an ordinary context. Rather, it is a polite way of saying that there are (high) chances that you will not be at the dinner. Likewise, you might look at the cloudy sky and then tell a friend: ‘I am afraid it is going to rain soon.’ Again, this is perfectly okay, but it does not report on your being in the grip of fear. More plausibly, it is just a way of communicating your thought that there are chances that it will rain and suggest that you are worried about it. In short, despite the use of a fear related talk, these are not cases of genuine experiences of fear. As such, they are not the focus of our discussion in this paper. To be sure, an interesting question arises as to how those cases relate to genuine experiences of fear—but it is not the question that we want to address here. Our focus, instead, will be on genuine fear, which we take to be a type of experience, that is, a type of conscious state with certain characteristic phenomenal and intentional (i.e., representational) features.³

A widely held view is that undergoing an experience of fear inherently involves an appraisal of dangerousness.⁴ Plausibly, such an appraisal is part of what cases like the ones mentioned right above—the non-genuine cases—lack. By contrast, when I see a barking dog and am afraid of him, I have an experience of dangerousness—more precisely, I represent a specific danger, the dog.⁵ The latter is the intentional object of my experience of fear—what it is of or about. Different fear-episodes can be directed upon different intentional objects—for example, dogs, spiders, exams, people, viruses, wars, economic crises, etc. However, common to all of them is their representing dangerousness: regardless of its being directed upon a dog, a war, coronavirus, a financial crisis, Donald Trump, fear will always represent the dangerousness of these things. So, dangerousness, too, is an object of fear, but in a different sense than dogs, wars, viruses, financial crises or Donald Trump. To mark this difference, dangerousness is usually referred to as the formal object of fear:⁶ it is the evaluative property fear (and no other emotion) is sensitive to (see, e.g., de Sousa 2002; Prinz 2004; Teroni 2007; Deonna & Teroni 2012; Scarantino & de Sousa 2018). As such, it is standardly taken to (i) individuate fear as an emotion-type,⁷ (ii) make it intelligible, and (iii) provide its appropriateness conditions (see, e.g., de Sousa 1987; Scarantino & de Sousa 2018).

2.2. From Dangerousness to Future-Orientation

We believe that fear’s future-orientation stems directly from the intimate relation with dangerousness that characterizes the nature of such an emotion. Let us see how.

At the outset, one might try to cash out the link between fear’s anticipatory element and its nature of danger-appraisal with the following suggestion: fear is always about a danger located in the future. However, this immediately appears as a highly implausible move, since the dangers that we detect when we are afraid are quite often in the present—and reasonably so, given that fear’s capability of informing us of present threats seems crucial to its evolutionary function.

Let us turn to a different suggestion, then. In the context of broader discussions on fear, Gordon (1980) and Davis (1987; 1988) suggest that reports of fear-experiences such as ‘I am afraid of the dog’ or ‘Johnny is afraid of the bully’ are shortcuts for (respectively) ‘I am afraid that the dog will harm me’ (cf. Gordon 1980: 561) and ‘Johnny is afraid that the bully will harm him’ (cf. Davis 1987: 289). Though it concerns linguistic paraphrases, such a suggestion presupposes a deeper revision in the intentional structure of the experience of fear, which is now cast as involving a representation of a future harm (see, e.g., Davis 1988: 472). So, for example, when you are afraid of a dog, your experience is not intentionally directed upon the dog that is now in front of you, but on the future state of affairs in which the dog harms you. Likewise, when Johnny is afraid of the bully, the object of his fear is not the bully he now encounters, but the future state of affairs in which the bully harms him. The inherent future-orientation of fear would thus be guaranteed by such a revision in its intentional structure: fear inherently anticipates the future insofar as it constitutively involves a representation of a future harm.

But now the question is: what in the nature of fear justifies such a revision in its intentional structure? Prima facie, it is not clear how we should answer this question, given the story above. Actually, it seems that, if we hold fixed the claim that fear involves an appraisal of dangerousness, we should expect it to represent dangers and not future harms—and so, to stick to our examples, the dog and the bully rather than the future harms they might cause. In short, the worry that lurks in the background here is that Davis’s and Gordon’s suggestion gives us fear’s future-orientation but also might bring along an undesired effect: a revision in our understanding of the nature of fear, which would no longer be cast as sensitive to (possibly present) dangers, but to harms that lie in the future. And to be sure, it is preferable to avoid such a revision. Notice, the problem is not the revision per se, which might be acceptable under the pressure of independent reasons of the right sort. The problem is that we do not seem to have such reasons in the present context; while on the contrary we do have strong, independent, and widely accepted reasons coming from both the philosophical and the empirical literature to construe fear as an appraisal of dangerousness.

The worry is legitimate. However, to avoid the undesired revision, we do not need to drop the suggestion that fear involves a representation of a future harm altogether—in fact, we believe that this is on the right track. What we do need, instead, is a more articulated story on what principled reasons motivate the inclusion of such a representation in a story that holds fixed that fear is primarily sensitive to dangerousness. Upon closer inspection, these reasons are not hard to find, after all. A present danger is something capable of producing some harm in the future. So, an inherent connection obtains between a danger and the possibility of some future harm. Given that, a plausible hypothesis is that fear, qua danger-sensitive emotion, will also involve something like an awareness of some possible future harm that the represented danger might cause—or merely an awareness that the identified danger will harm someone or something. Let us explore this connection a bit further.

Suppose you are out for a walk and, at some point, encounter a dog growling or barking at you. Immediately, you start experiencing fear—you appraise the dog (or his being around) as dangerous, and start being afraid of him (or of his being around). Now, we believe it is plausible to say that, in this context, you are also aware of some harm the dog might cause to you—or just that he might harm you somehow. In fact, the dangerousness of the dog would not be detected, if the dog himself was not appreciated by you as something that might bring about some harm soon (but has not yet). More specifically, our claim is: you appraise the dangerousness of the dog in virtue of such an awareness that he might harm you somehow in the (near) future. Fear thus requires an awareness of the possibility of some future harm, insofar as the appraisal of dangerousness inherently involved in such an emotion is grounded in that awareness.⁸ In short, your fear involves:

1. An appraisal of the dangerousness of the dog, which is grounded in (ii), that is:

2. An awareness of the possible harm that the dog is likely to cause in the (near) future.

We think that this structure generalizes and applies roughly speaking to all genuine experiences of fear. This clarifies the sense in which fear requires a representation of some future harm without introducing any deep revision in the nature or intentionality of fear of the sort we would like to avoid: dangerousness remains the formal object of the emotion, while specific dangers are still its intentional objects.

Once we accept this, the next step is to acknowledge that undergoing an experience of fear involves the representation of two distinct, though connected, temporal locations. Consider, for example, Johnny: he is in the school’s corridor, when he suddenly sees the bully. He appraises (the presence of) the bully as dangerous in virtue of envisaging some possible harm the bully might cause to him. By having this experience, then, Johnny is aware of the temporal location of the danger he detects—the bully (or his being around nearby), who is in Johnny’s present (t₁); but he is also aware of the temporal location of the harm the bully might cause, which is some time t₂ in the future of the present time t₁.

Hence, the two-dimensional temporal orientation of fear, articulated as follows:

• Temporal topic (or simply topic): It is delivered by the represented temporal location of the intentional object an episode of fear is intentionally directed upon. Importantly, fear has no inherent temporal orientation with respect to its topic. For although it is typically about objects located in the present, it can well be about things that lie in the future—or even in the past, as we are going to argue in the next sections.

• Temporal target (or simply target): It corresponds to the represented location of the harm the dangerous thing might cause. The target is thus always in the future in that fear always involves an awareness of a future harm in the way described right above. In particular, it is in the future with respect to both (a) the time at which the dangerous object is located, and (b) the subject’s present (i.e., the deictic centre of the fear episode).⁹

This, we maintain, is the correct understanding of fear’s inherent orientation toward the future: when we are afraid, we detect a danger (at some location in time) because we envisage the possibility of a future harm. So, far from being at odds with it, the intimate relation with dangerousness is what fear’s future-orientation directly stems from.

To sum up, our framework to account for fear’s temporal orientation articulates in the following claims:

1. Nature. Fear inherently involves an appraisal of the dangerousness of an X, the intentional object of the experience. Such an appraisal is grounded in the awareness of some harm that X might cause in the future.

2. 2D temporal orientation. Fear has a temporal topic—given by the representation of the temporal location of its intentional object. This can vary, though it is typically the present. In addition, it has a temporal target—given by the representation of the temporal location of the harm the intentional object might cause. The target always lies in the future with respect to both the topic and the subject’s present.

3. Inherent future-orientation. Since it inherently involves an appraisal of dangerousness, which is grounded in the awareness of a future harm, fear inherently targets the future, independently of what its topic is. In this sense, it is inherently future-oriented.

So, according to our 2D framework, fear’s temporal orientation is not uniquely tied to the temporal location of the intentional object of a fear episode but is richer and more articulated. Fear provides explicit information concerning both the temporal location of the intentional object (the danger one detects) and that of the harm it might cause. This is worth stressing because it sets us apart from other existing ways of looking at fear’s temporal orientation that, instead, seem to conceive it as one-dimensional—that is, as uniquely dependent on the temporal location of its intentional object (see Gordon 1980; Davis 1987; 1988; Roberts 2003; Prinz 2004; Price 2006).

We are now in the position to clarify a point concerning the conceptual connection between danger and harm in relation to our 2D account. At this stage, one may wonder whether being dangerous is analytically equivalent to (or even identical with) being potentially harmful. We are not against such an analysis of dangerousness. However, accepting it does not make our 2D account unnecessary. Even if there is only one property involved here (i.e., being dangerous ultimately boils down to being potentially harmful), the intentional structure of fear, as far as its temporal orientation is concerned, is still articulated around two foci. First of all, if being dangerous and being potentially harmful are indeed analytically equivalent, representing an X as dangerous just is representing X as capable of producing some harm. So construed, representation of X’s dangerousness is representation of some causal link between X (the danger) and its possible harmful deliverances (the harm). But this plausibly involves representing two different temporal locations, too—namely, that of X (the danger) and that of the possible harm it might cause. Our main thesis is that fear’s temporal orientation does not coincide with just one of them but encompasses both.

Secondly, and relatedly, the same property has to be apprehended from two different temporal standpoints, as it were. Otherwise, we would not be in the position to explain why envisaging a future harm may push us to act in the present. To see the point, consider the following analogy from a very different context. Imagine you want to program a computer to make stock investments for you over the next three years and be sure that it does not make risky investments. To that end, you define ‘risky’ as being more than 50% likely to lead to a loss in the next six months. Although, by stipulation, you have identified the property of being risky with a certain future-oriented procedure, you still need the program to handle information concerning two temporal locations: the time of the investment, and the prospected trajectory of the market in the following six months.

3.1. Challenges from the Past

As some have pointed out (e.g., Roberts 2003; Prinz 2004), at least in some cases, it seems that we can be afraid of things in the past. For example, ‘I can fear that I left the burner on’ (Prinz 2004: 28) or ‘[a person] might fear that [their] mother was on an airplane that [they] know to have crashed a couple of hours earlier’ (adapted from Roberts 2003: 193). Cases like these have been used to argue that fear has no special connection with the future and, more generally, no inherent temporal orientation whatsoever—it can be indifferently about the present, the future, or the past.

We will get back to that in the next section. Let us see now why cases of this sort are problematic for our account. Consider the following example. It’s Monday afternoon, you are working in your office when you suddenly realize that your daughter, Mevina, might have decided to go ice-skating alone in the morning, although she is not very good at it. You know that on Mondays the ice pavilion is open only in the morning. So, by now either Mevina is unharmed (either because she did not go, or because she went but did not harm herself), or she is harmed. You know that if she went, it is much more likely that she got injured—and of course you do not want that. Falling while skating may be something that harms her. Even though you might suffer further consequences from that, you are now focused on what might have happened to her. Therefore, both the danger (her going to the pavilion) and the harm (her getting injured) are in the past. And yet, the thought that she might have gone scares you. Note that this is a case of non-egocentric, altruistic fear. Although feeling ‘for’ others are arguably non-standard cases of emotions,¹⁰ it is plausible to maintain that the phenomenology involved in such cases does not differ dramatically from that of egocentric fear. That makes the previous example problematic for us. The reason why is straightforward. Our 2D account prescribes that the target (the harm) be future not only relative to the topic (the danger), but also relative to the fear episode. Yet, in the example of the parent and Mevina both the target and the topic are past with respect to the fear episode.

We call this problem the Restricted Challenge, as it does not express a general worry but construes the problem as a problem for our 2D framework.

However, a deeper and more general question arises here: How can a past-located event, whose relevant harmful consequences are also located in the subject’s past, still be appraised by that subject as dangerous and thus be the object of an experience of fear? For plausibly, something is dangerous as long as it has potential harmful consequences; however, at the time at which the parent is afraid that Mevina went to the ice pavilion, either Mevina is already hurt—and thus the harmful consequence has already happened; or she is safe at home—and thus no harmful consequence has happened or will happen.

Either way, the state of affairs in which Mevina goes to the ice pavilion is no longer dangerous with respect to its being a potential source of injuries for her. In other words, the pastness of the potential harmful consequences of Mevina having gone to the ice pavilion seems to have ‘neutralized’ the very dangerousness of that situation, which seems to be no longer dangerous—even if perhaps it was. But why then should the parent be afraid of it at all? More generally, why should one experience fear in cases like this? And yet, at the same time, we do seem to experience something like fear in those cases. How to explain that?

Notice, raising these questions does not just mean blaming a specific account for delivering wrong predictions. The worry here is broader and concerns how we should explain (or explain away) the possibility of being afraid of the past, not given a specific account of fear’s temporal orientation, but given the widespread understanding of fear as a danger-sensitive emotion. For on the face of it, the two things seem to be at odds—there just seems to be no point in attributing dangerousness to things that can no longer harm anyone or anything; and yet, it seems, we can still be afraid of them. So, allowing for the possibility that we are afraid of the past does not simply seem to undermine the connection between fear and future but pushes us to reflect on the very nature of fear as a danger-detection mechanism. Therefore, one way or another, any theory of fear must tell us something about this. This is the Unrestricted Challenge raised by fear of the past and is what makes cases of fearing the past worth discussing.

In the rest of this section, we will develop a reply to the Restricted Challenge—that is, we will present in detail how our 2D framework is capable of accounting for fearing the past. By doing that, we will offer our reply to the Unrestricted Challenge, too. For as we will make clear in due course, our account is not only capable of accommodating cases of fearing the past but also offers a principled and articulated explanation of them.

But why should we put forward such an account at all? Should the considerations right above not push us in the direction of simply denying the very possibility of fearing the past, instead? Though this is an option (see, e.g., Davis 1987), it is not the line we intend to pursue here, for at least two reasons. The first is methodological: such an extreme attitude should come as a result of an unproductive exploration of the viability of alternative and more moderate possibilities that make sense of an intuitive datum. After all, the challenge is to provide an explanation of fearing the past. Starting with a mere denial of such a possibility looks more like avoiding the challenge than replying to it. Moreover, an account that is shown to be compatible with that possibility and explains it must be preferred to alternatives that do not explain it or are in principle not compatible with it.

The second reason has more to do with the details of our account, and so it will become fully clear as we go along. However, just to anticipate a bit, we do not believe that all cases of fearing the past are of the same type. We are open to conceding that sometimes one undergoes more borderline experiences—even though we will argue that even in those cases there are grounds to talk of genuine fear (see Subsect. 3.2). At the same time, we maintain that some other cases are less borderline—or not borderline at all—and, at least in those cases, we can be genuinely afraid of the past. We leave up to what follows the task of spelling out this in greater detail.

3.2. Former Dangers: The Relative Future Hypothesis

To develop our 2D account, we will adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy. That is, we will distinguish different types of cases and put forward as many different hypotheses to account for each of them (this and the next two subsections). Then, we will wrap up and show how they are all integrated into a unitary and articulated account of fearing the past (Subsect. 3.5).

For starters, one may think that fearing the past is undergoing an emotional experience directed upon a past danger. However, the expression ‘past danger’ is ambiguous between being a former danger and being a thing in the past that is still an active danger. A former danger is a no-longer-active danger. That is, it is something that was in the position to produce some harmful consequences but is no longer in that position, when considered from the point of view of the present. In short, its dangerousness is gone. Something might no longer be in the position to harm for different reasons. For example, it might have succeeded in causing the relevant harm it was supposed to be able to cause; or it might have failed to do so—for example, someone might have intervened and made the dangerous thing itself innocuous. By contrast, a still-active danger is something that is temporally located in the past, but whose dangerousness is not past. Namely, it is now somehow still in the position to produce relevant possible harmful consequences in the future. Therefore, one thing is to represent something as a former danger, another thing is to represent something in the past as a still-active danger.

Our working hypothesis is that representing something as a former danger or as a still-active danger makes the difference to one’s experience of fear. In the latter case, one is genuinely afraid of the past (more on this in Subsects. 3.3 and 3.4). In the former case, things are a bit fuzzier and the experience one undergoes is more borderline. Let us have a closer look.

Let us go back to the example of the parent and Mevina. As we have described it, the case is one of representing a former danger. Cases of this sort retain some elements of continuity with paradigmatic cases of fear—the main of them being that the temporal relation between the topic and the target is locally preserved, that is, the latter is in the future of the former. At the same time, they exhibit some important differences. The most striking one is that the target is not in the future of the subject, as we noted in presenting the Restricted Challenge. The relative future-ness of the target is enough to appraise the dangerousness of Mevina going to the ice pavilion, but not enough to ground an appraisal of it as a still-active danger—hence, its being represented as a former danger. So, there is a sense in which the parent experientially appreciates dangerousness, even though it is not exactly the same as the one involved in paradigmatic cases of fear. This is what makes these types of cases a bit fuzzy and borderline.

Nonetheless, we believe that it also provides sufficient support to claim that the parent undergoes a genuine experience of fear with the following important qualification. Experiences of fear do not all come with the same overall intensity. On the contrary, they vary along a whole spectrum of cases that ranges from core cases, which are phenomenally very vivid and intense, to non-core cases, whose phenomenology is somewhat impoverished and faded.¹¹ Our proposal is that the description of the parent’s experience suggests that she is undergoing a non-core case of fear, somewhat close to the boundaries of what still counts as fear.

To sum up, a first type of cases of fearing the past have the following structure: they involve a representation of a former danger grounded in the representation of a harm that is in the future only relative to that danger. That is, using the terminology of our 2D framework, in these cases: (a) the topic is the past, and (b) the target is only relatively in the future, since it is in the future of the topic but not in the future of the subject of the experience. Such a structure is responsible for a somewhat impoverished phenomenology, which involves an element of experiential appreciation of dangerousness, but not of a still-active danger. This is enough to make these cases genuine experiences of fear. However, it is not enough to make them core cases. These are then non-core, and often borderline, cases of fear that occupy a very eccentric position in the spectrum. This is the relative future hypothesis.¹²

Though we consider them as cases of fear, we are aware that much of that depends on where one exactly sets the boundaries for such an emotion—less liberal views might just cast these cases as falling out of the boundaries of fear. We acknowledge that this is a matter of dispute and are open to the option that cases of experiences directed upon a former danger do not count as cases of fear at all. Be that as it may, as we have already anticipated, we do not think that all cases of fearing the past involve the representation of a former danger. Some of them do, while others involve a representation of a past thing as a still-active danger—and the most substantial part of our proposal concerns precisely these cases.

Finally, the example of the parent and Mevina suggests that there is a connection between former dangers, as they are explained by the relative future hypothesis, and non-egocentric, altruistic cases of fear. After all, it is plausible to hypothesize that the strong emotional connection that binds us to our loved ones plays a role here and pushes us to represent a past event as dangerous, even if such an event is not a potential source of future harm for us (or regardless of whether it is) but might have harmed (or did harm) only (or mainly) our loved ones. However, we are not taking a stance on this connection here.

Regardless, there seem to be cases of egocentric fear that involve the representation of a former danger. Typically, they involve memories of past fears, which trigger a new episode of fear in the present. For instance, yesterday you were mugged by a thug who threatened you with a knife. Luckily, you did not suffer any negative consequences. Today, when you are safe at home, the memory of the assault comes back to you. As you remember the episode, a shiver of fear runs down your spine. The encounter with the thug was dangerous because there was a possible harm (as the memory of the sharp knife in front of you reminds you) in your future. You know that you are now safe at home and you are remembering and not imagining yourself in the past. Yet, clearly, your memory of what happened yesterday is emotionally charged: you are afraid. Plausibly, you are representing your encounter with the thug as a former danger. Thus, cases such as this, too, can be interpreted in terms of the relative future hypothesis. They are then genuine but non-core episodes of fear.¹³

3.3. Still-Active Dangers (I): The Partial Grounding Hypothesis

We turn now to still-active dangers. Let us begin with the following example. Suppose that you have made a very hazardous investment. You hear that the stock market has dropped at the opening today, and you are afraid that the stock you bought is involved in the drop, but at the moment you have no access to the details of the situation. Although the drop of the stock market and your loss of money (if it has happened) are in the past, it seems obvious that the prospect of the problems that will ensue from the loss plays a crucial role in making you afraid of what might have happened in the morning. Clear cases of still-active dangers such as this one are not problematic for the idea that fear is future-oriented, assuming the 2D framework: even if the danger (the topic) is past, its possible relevant harmful effects (the target) lie in the future—and that is perfectly in line with what our framework predicts.

However, not all cases of still-active danger are so easily tractable. Consider the following example. Sarah learns about a plane crash that happened two hours ago, and she is afraid that her mother was on that plane (readapted from Roberts 2003; a similar case is also discussed by Davis 1987). In this case, the danger (the topic) is the fact that Sarah’s mother could have been on the plane, while the harm (the target) is the fact that Sarah’s mother might have been seriously injured in the accident or might have died. It is not implausible that Sarah has some altruistic, non-egocentric feeling toward her mother, like Mevina’s parent toward their daughter. However, it is also plausible to think that this is not the end of the story and interpret Sarah’s fear as involving some egocentric elements, too, since what might have happened to the mother relevantly affects Sarah’s future. If so, the crash of the plane is not merely a former danger, but it is clearly a still-active danger.¹⁴

Insofar as Sarah represents what might have happened to her mother as still dangerous, a further ingredient intervenes. More precisely, Sarah appraises as dangerous the fact that her mother was on the plane in virtue of

Also, Sarah represents (H2) not just as a consequence of (H1), but as a relevant consequence of the envisaged circumstance of her mother’s being on the plane—a projection in the future of the harmful consequences of that fact (if that has happened).

We maintain that many cases of still-active dangers have the same structure. Awareness of the possible harm an X might have already caused in someone’s past, alone, is not enough—it might suffice to ground a representation of a former danger but it only partially grounds an appraisal of X as still dangerous. To have a full ground, and hence a representation of X as a still-active danger, something else must intervene—that is, a representation of some further possible future harmful consequences in someone’s future, considered as still being strongly tied to X. In short, in this type of case, a subject is not only aware of the harm that X might have already caused but also envisages a further possible harm in their future, which is yet to come but still tied to X.

We call this the partial grounding hypothesis. The cases captured by this hypothesis, such as the plane crash example as described right above, are not cast as non-core cases of fear. By contrast, they are very close to core, if not perfectly core, cases. The only difference is that the appraisal of dangerousness is partially grounded in the past harmful consequences of the dangerous event. However, this should not be too much of a concern. First, it largely depends on the fact that we are dealing with dangerous events that are located in the subject’s past—as such, they are likely to have their most immediate consequences still in the subject’s past. The real question is whether those consequences are sufficient to ground the subject’s appraisal of events in the past as still dangerous, which leads us to the second point: the partial grounding hypothesis maintains that they are not sufficient—their role is important but not exhaustive. The further future harm then is crucial to secure the full ground, and hence the detection of a still-active danger. So as in core cases, the harm in the future of the mental episode plays the crucial role.¹⁵

The partial grounding hypothesis allows us to explain the difference between the scenario that we have discussed—in which Sarah knows that the plane crashed but does not know whether her mother was on the plane—and another one, close but slightly different, in which Sarah knows that her mother was on the plane that crashed but does not know whether she is dead. Only in the first scenario it seems correct to say that Sarah is afraid that her mother was on the plane. In the second scenario, it seems more appropriate to say that Sarah is afraid that her mother died. More to the point, the second scenario seems to be one in which the only relevant harm is in the future of the fear episode. If Sarah appraises the possible death of her mother as dangerous, then she is plausibly already considering the likely future harmful consequences of her mother’s death: the sorrow for her loss, the loneliness, etc. Whereas, in the first scenario, at least some harmful consequences are in the past. The second scenario is more similar to the unproblematic case of the dangerous investment that we have discussed at the beginning of this subsection, although of course it may involve altruistic elements.

According to the partial grounding hypothesis, an event in the past is appraised as dangerous in virtue of envisaging both a harm in the past and a harm in the future with respect to the fear episode itself. More precisely, Sarah’s fear is grounded in the envisaging of two kinds of possible harmful consequences of the circumstance in which her mother might have found herself. In the first scenario those are:

Sarah’s present fear episode is partially grounded in her envisaging (Harm-in-the-past), and partially grounded in her envisaging (Harm-in-the-future), and fully grounded only in her envisaging both.¹⁶

3.4. Still-Active Dangers (II): The Mental Time Travel Hypothesis

There is at least another way of representing something in the past as still dangerous, and not as merely containing a former danger. To illustrate it, let us build up a little narrative for the example of the plane crash.

Suppose that, while listening to the news, Sarah learns that an American Airlines plane to New York crashed two hours earlier in a terrible accident. She knows that her mother was flying to New York today, but cannot remember whether she was flying with American Airlines or another company. So, Sarah does not know whether her mother was on that plane. However, she wonders about this and gets worried. In particular, at some point, she starts considering the scenario in which her mother was on the plane and starts imagining, quite vividly, her mother seated on the plane, the moment of the accident, the wounded passengers and, among them, her mother. Sarah now visualises her mother lying in a hospital bed and her father crying. The mother might be dead—Sarah now visualises the funeral, her father’s sorrow and thinks how empty their lives will be without her mother; or the mother might not be dead, but she might still be seriously injured—Sarah now visualises their mother in a wheelchair; and so on. In other words, Sarah gets imaginatively engaged with the thought that her mother was on the plane that crashed, figures at least some of the possible (bad) consequences of that fact and becomes afraid that her mother was on that plane.

This seems a perfectly plausible narrative for our example. The mental time travel hypothesis submits that something like that happens in at least some cases of fearing the past—specifically, those that are phenomenologically very vivid, so vivid that they are to be considered core cases of fear.¹⁷

To spell out this proposal more theoretically, as it is described right above, the plane crash case can be accounted for in terms of a psychological mechanism in which two factors play a crucial role: (i) the epistemic condition of the subject (the subject does not know whether what they represent as dangerous has actually happened) and (ii) a strong imaginative engagement with the possible scenario the subject is contemplating. More precisely:

1. Sarah considers the (epistemically) possible world in which, at t₁, her mother is on the plane that crashes at t₂;

2. Sarah considers that world as actual and self-locates in that world, not only with respect to a spatial point of view, but also with respect to a temporal point of view;

3. In virtue of (b), Sarah represents the fact that her mother is on the plane not just as actual, but as something that is happening now (so, Sarah represents that her mother is on the plane);

4. Thus, Sarah represents the harmful consequences of her mother’s being on the plane, as consequences in her future, given that she knows that the plane will crash.

In short, the idea is that the combination of the epistemic condition of the subject and the imaginative process delivers something like a ‘linear transformation’ on the subject’s timeline of the topic-target pair: the topic and the target are now represented as being in the present and in the future of the subject, respectively. Thus, due to such linear transformation, according to the mental time travel hypothesis, at least some episodes of fearing the past have exactly the same structure as core cases. The attribution of still-active dangerousness to a past event, which has harmful consequences in the past, is explained by the psychological mechanism sketched out above. This also squares nicely with the phenomenological vividness of these cases.

Both the partial grounding hypothesis and the mental time travel hypothesis are viable options for the 2D framework, which is not forced to choose between them. In fact, we submit, they should be both integrated in the 2D framework and used to explain different cases of fearing the past, depending on how close (or far) they are to core cases. Those cases that are quite vivid and very close to core cases, but still not perfectly overlapping with them, can be accounted for in terms of the partial grounding hypothesis. The maximally close to core cases of fearing the past—the ones that perfectly overlap with and reasonably count as core cases—can be accounted for in terms of the mental time travel hypothesis. The same applies to the plane crash example: depending on how vivid and close to core one wants to describe it, one might choose one hypothesis or the other to account for it. The final step is to integrate the relative future hypothesis: it can be used to account for those cases of fearing the past that are non-core and in fact quite far from being core.

We conclude this subsection with a quick discussion of two types of cases that plausibly rely on a similar psychological mechanism.¹⁸ The first is the case of reconsideration of past events. When engaged in episodic memory, we can think of a past event that we did not consider dangerous (or not very much so) at the time and realize (due to knowledge of certain factors that we gained in the meanwhile), or come to believe (due to change in contextual factors, such as a different mood) that much more harmful consequences could have happened. This may engender a concurrent fear episode. The second is the case of imagined scenarios. When we consider possible alternatives, or in situations of mind-wandering, we may envisage states of affairs that we recognize as dangerous. These situations, too, may come emotionally charged with fear.

The mental time travel hypothesis can be used to explain how both cases fit the 2D mold, and thus how they retain a constitutive link with future-orientation. When you remember something that happened to you in the past and realize that you have been in a much more dangerous situation than it seemed at the time—for example, because you now understand that you came very close to losing your own life—you do not necessarily undergo an episode of fear. You may cool-headedly come to believe that, and move on. However, you may also find yourself in the grip of fear. The mental time travel hypothesis makes a plausible prediction in distinguishing the cool-headed case from the emotionally charged one. When you are in the grip of fear while considering a dangerous situation in your past, the possible harm connected to the dangerous situation is very vivid in your present imagination. The hypothesis is that what makes the situation scary, and not just dangerous in the abstract, is that you envisage a harm as if it was in your future now.

Something similar applies to the case of mind-wandering and imagined scenarios. One might consider dangerous hypothetical scenarios cold-bloodedly; but one might as well experience fear while going through those scenarios—and perhaps because of that. The apparent difficulty, in this type of case, is that there does not seem to be a clear connection between the scenario one is entertaining and one’s temporal location—after all, in this case, one is not reconsidering an episodic memory about one’s own past; rather, one is merely contemplating a possibility. For example, suppose that you are daydreaming being a different person, in a radically different world. If the intentional content of your mind wandering is just a fantasy, how can it be what you are afraid of?¹⁹ Our explanation, in terms of mental time travel (broadly understood), is: the abstract speculation of what could happen to you becomes scary as soon as you envisage the harm in your actual future, thereby envisaging the danger connected to it as one that is in your world (and possibly in your present).

3.5. Taking Stock: The 2D Account of Fearing the Past

To wrap up, the account we propose emerges as a result of the integration of the different hypotheses we have put forward, each of them accounting for the different types of cases we have distinguished along the way. Such an account is 2D, insofar as it uses the 2D framework to describe and make sense of those cases. It constitutively accepts and exploits the articulation of fear’s temporal orientation into two different dimensions, the topic and the target, as well as its being inherently future-oriented in the sense specified in Section 2.

The starting point is the distinction between the former dangerousness of an X and the still-active dangerousness of an X located in the past. Representing the former or the latter, we maintain, crucially depends on whether and how a representation of a possible harm in the subject’s future grounds the appraisal of dangerousness that constitutes the experience of fear one undergoes. This makes such an experience more or less structurally continuous with paradigmatic cases of fear, thereby delivering differences in the phenomenology one experiences.

We acknowledge that in some cases the target is not in the future of the subject. These are cases where a former danger is represented. However, first of all, the local futurity of the target still plays an important role. Secondly, our account explains these cases in a principled way, highlighting what they retain of paradigmatic cases of fear and how and why they are non-core, but quite borderline. Finally, our account stresses that they are just a subset of the cases of fearing the past—but not all of them. So, our proposal is not ad hoc, insofar as it does not treat every case of fearing the past as non-core, which would be dubious and suspect.

In the other cases, something in the past is appraised as a still-active danger in virtue of the subject’s envisaging a possible harm in their future along the lines of what happens in more familiar and paradigmatic cases of fear—for example, when one is afraid of a dog. However, some further distinction is still to be drawn here. Sometimes, such an envisaging is easily explained by the fact that the relevant harmful consequences of the thing appraised as still dangerous all lie in the subject’s future (e.g., the hazardous investment case). So nothing else must be added to the basic structure of the 2D framework. These are clearly core cases and pose no serious threat. In other cases, a psychological mechanism is at play of the sort we have hypothesized in the case of the mental time-travel hypothesis. When that happens, we predict, the subject undergoes an experience that is maximally close to a core-case. In yet other cases, the subject’s appraisal of dangerousness of an X in the past can be grounded in the joint awareness of the past and some further future harmful consequences of X (partial grounding hypothesis). These cases are importantly similar to core cases, though structurally slightly different. Hence, we predict a corresponding slight difference in their phenomenology.

The futurity of the target relative to the subject’s location is then the crucial factor that explains the attribution of dangerousness, even when the topic is in the past. In fact, it is what makes sense of one’s undergoing a very intense and vivid experience of fear. When it is there, we have an experiential appreciation of something as a still-active danger, and one undergoes a core, or very close to core, case of fear. When it is not there, instead, some element of that fear-ish experiential appreciation remains, but in a somewhat impoverished and less vivid way.

This is our reply to both the challenges individuated at the beginning of this section, the restricted and the unrestricted one. We have shown how cases of fearing the past are accounted for by the 2D framework. This replies to the Restricted Challenge. Moreover, by having made clear what grounds the appraisal of dangerousness in those cases, we have provided a principled explanation that makes full sense of how and why we can be genuinely afraid of the past, holding fixed an understanding of fear as a danger-sensitive emotion. This replies to the Unrestricted Challenge. Importantly, our proposal does that without denying that the dangerous thing has had relevant consequences in the past. The core of our suggestion is not denying that the X that one fears might have already harmed something or someone—we accept that. Rather, our suggestion is: to be the object of one’s fear in a fully-fledged sense, an X must be appraised as still dangerous—otherwise, one’s experience still counts as fear but not of the paradigmatic sort. To experience an X as still dangerous, the subject must somehow still envisage some possible harm that X might cause in their future—regardless of whether this happens in the way described by the partial grounding hypothesis or in the way described by the mental time travel hypothesis. In this sense then fear is still inherently future-oriented, despite its being about something in the past. And such an inherent future-orientation is crucial to explain the possibility of fearing the past.