Fear has typically been understood as a forward-looking emotion. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle defined it as that negative feeling (‘a disturbance’) that is due to ‘a mental picture of some destructive or painful evil in the future’. From an evolutionary point of view, fear helps us avoid threats and prepares us for what could happen. It is because of the signal of fear that we find ways to escape dangerous situations like a growling wild animal or a collapsing tree. Both philosophy and psychology take this future orientation to be a constitutive feature of fear.
But everyday life offers cases in which we seem genuinely afraid of the past. This seems to go against the most prominent views of how fear operates but, surprisingly, fear of the past can be reconciled with fear’s future-leaning structure. Even when fear looks backward, it does so to reach ahead. Fear keeps its eyes on tomorrow – even when it is about yesterday. How?
To make sense of the idea of fearing the past, the first step is to get a better grip on what its temporal orientation boils down to – in particular, what its ‘looking ahead’ consists in. Think of fear as your mind’s danger detector. Consider an uncomplicated case: you turn a corner and see a barking dog. Fear grips you – you are afraid of the dog. You appraise it as dangerous. But that is not all. You also anticipate a harm the dog might cause – say, a bite. In our view, these two elements are closely linked: you take the dog to be dangerous by anticipating its bite. The dog you see is in the present; the bite you anticipate is in the future. So your fear keeps one eye on the present and one on the future.
This structure generalises. Fear does not just label things ‘dangerous’; it does so by anticipating the future harms something might cause, or the harmful consequences a situation might deliver. Its forward-looking character – its ‘looking ahead’ – resides in that anticipation.
On these grounds, we distinguish two parts of fear:
- The topic of fear is what your mind takes to be dangerous – a dog’s snarl, a market plunge, a plane crash, a burner possibly left on. The topic can be present, future or (crucially) past.
- The target of your fear is the harm your mind is bracing for – the bite, the loss, the injury, the house fire, the grief, the fallout. The target – the ‘what might come of this’ – is always projected into the future relative to you. Fear appraises something as dangerous by anticipating a future harm it could deliver. That’s its anticipatory ingredient.
The topic and the target are like two pins on a timeline, and the pins can move. The topic doesn’t need to be present. You can fear something in the past – if your mind is still projecting forward to harms that would still matter for your life now. That’s the key: in order to count as fear in the full-blooded sense, the emotion has to trigger a forward-looking leap, not merely register a sad historical fact. And there are three ways in which that can happen.
1) Still-active dangers: when what you fear can still harm you
Imagine you read a bulletin that a plane crashed two hours ago. Your mother is travelling today, but you can’t recall which airline she took. What if she was on that flight? Your stomach drops; fear grips you. If she was on that flight, she was. It’s done. The past is, well, past. There is nothing you can do now – you can’t call her to keep her from boarding, or avert the crash. But you don’t yet know for certain. Fear lands hard.
Here, the topic (the crash; your mother possibly being on the flight) is in the past. But your mind isn’t registering only that possibility. It is rapidly sketching the downstream, decidedly future-facing consequences: a life changed by grief. Your appraisal of danger is partially grounded in a past harm that may already have occurred (your mother’s death) and in the fresh harms that would follow for you and yours if it did. That second part – what we might call the further, forward-projected harm – is what makes this feel like full fear, not just a delayed reaction. Your body and mind are bracing for the world you might have to inhabit next.
The danger you’re focusing on lines up with the harm whose effects would unfold into your future
This pattern shows up in financial fear, too. You made a hazardous investment; the market plunged at the opening bell. Even if the loss is already ‘in the past’, your fear vivifies what that loss will now set in motion: bills, constraints, awkward conversations, long-term plans reshaped. Again, the topic can sit in yesterday while the target lives in the tomorrows you’re now modelling.
Notice, too, how things can change depending on your knowledge. If you don’t know whether your mother was on the crashed plane, you will probably express your emotions by saying ‘I fear she took that flight.’ But if you know your mother was on the plane and don’t know her condition, you’re more likely to say: ‘I fear she died.’ The danger you’re now focusing on lines up with the harm whose effects would unfold into your near-future. That’s fear’s future-pointing feature stepping in.
2) Mental time travel: when imagination relocates the danger into your ‘now’
Sometimes, fear of the past feels utterly immediate – heart pounding, all systems go – even though the event is already fixed. Why?
Part of the answer lies in the way imagination lets us move around in time, which philosophers and psychologists call mental time travel. Sometimes, we don’t just consider possibilities; we inhabit them. You hear about the crash. You vividly picture your mother onboard – her seat, the moment of impact, the funeral, the rooms at home without her. Imaginatively, you have ‘stepped into’ an as-yet undecided scenario and placed yourself there, so that the dangerous event is represented as happening now, and the unfolding harms are represented as just ahead. The topic and target have been mentally slid forward on your timeline by virtue of your imagination. That is why the fear feels so present: your anticipatory system is firing as if the danger were current.
Even when the topic lies in the past, the harm you are bracing for still belongs to your possible future
We do this with memories, too. You recall the alley where you once felt in danger, and you mentally step back into that scene. As you imagine what might have happened next there – a shove, a shout, an attack – that imagined ‘next event’ ahead of the remembered moment becomes the fear’s target now. And we do it in daydreams: we idly picture a bad turn of events. As soon as imagination places that bad scenario in our future, fear arises as if it were about to happen. That’s why mere bad thoughts can lead to fear.
Across these first two patterns, the basic shape is the same. Even when the topic lies in the past, the harm you are bracing for – the target – still belongs to your possible future, whether straightforwardly (still-active dangers) or in an ‘as if now’ way (mental time travel). But you might be wondering what happens in a different kind of case: when both the dangerous situation and its harm already lie in your own past, and yet you still feel something very much like fear.
3) Former dangers: when the past danger’s harm is already settled
Imagine it’s afternoon when the thought hits you: your daughter may have gone ice-skating this morning without supervision. The rink is closed now. Either she fell and got hurt, or she didn’t. Your fear surges.
Here the topic (the skating) and the most immediate harm (the fall) are both in the past. There’s nothing to head off. And yet, many of us recognise the feeling: a wincing, breath-held fear for what may already be true. This is a case of a former danger: something that was in a position to cause harm but is no longer in that position now. Your mind is still future-oriented in some sense, but it is looking at the future from a past standpoint, not from your present one. The target (the possible fall) is ‘future’ only relative to the topic of your fear (the unsupervised skating), not future relative to your present moment. As a result, these episodes tend to feel less vivid. Unless your mental life takes you back, as in the mental time-travel scenario, you are likely to keep your emotions in check.
In former dangers, your fear echoes a ‘what next’ that once lay in the event’s own future
You’ll feel versions of this, too, when a frightening memory resurfaces: the knife in the robbery, the screech of brakes, the conversation where everything turned. The danger then had a not-yet harm; your present memory revives the appraisal, but without a fresh ‘what next’ pointed at your immediate future. That’s why we think that, in these types of cases, the emotion often sits in a borderland between fear and anxiety, and might be mixed with something more like shock, sorrow or regret.
In all three types of cases, what we call ‘fear of the past’ turns out to share a common structure. In still-active dangers, the harm you are bracing for clearly lies in your possible future. In mental time travel, imagination temporarily pulls a possible future into an ‘as if now’ present. In former dangers, your fear echoes a ‘what next’ that once lay in the event’s own future.
So if you wonder how it is possible to fear events that have already happened, there is no need to abandon what philosophy and psychology say. Look at it the right way. Once we realise that fear has two temporal foci – the topic and the target – the puzzle dissolves: even when what scares you has already happened, fear looks at how things might unfold – or might have unfolded – beyond that event, not at the bare fact that it once occurred. What matters to fear is that the future is at stake.
