Andrew C. answered • 03/25/21
10 Years in College Admissions, Advising, Recruitment, and Placement
This is a fundamentally challenging question, and one at the root of Heidegger's work. Ontic and Ontological are deeply connected ideas and can be hard to distinguish, but Ontic tends to correspond to the substance and/or structure of an entity at hand. For example, what makes a thing that thing. What makes you, you, or a shoe a shoe. Ontology is more or less referencing the idea of existing, or an existential reckoning.
To this regard, ontic anxiety pertains more to the idea of threatened self-preservation such as fate, death, etc... but not to necessarily include moral/spiritual aspects. Ontic anxiety can be more readily understood by most people as "there is no escape from [this condition]." Ontological anxiety would be addressing the idea of an existential crisis. The impending fear and anxiety attributed to the absoluteness of extinction or non-existence. It helps to remember that "onto" is the Greek work for being so you can literally thing of ontological anxiety as the fear of not being, or never having been.
