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Being bored: Heidegger on patience and melancholy

Espen Hammer
a a

University of Essex Published online: 04 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Espen Hammer (2004) Being bored: Heidegger on patience and melancholy, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 12:2, 277-295, DOI: 10.1080/09608780410001676494 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09608780410001676494

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British Journal for the History of Philosophy 12(2) 2004: 277295

ARTICLE BEING BORED: HEIDEGGER ON PATIENCE AND MELANCHOLY1

Espen Hammer
Downloaded by [University of Glasgow] at 09:43 22 December 2013 As a result of its pivotal role in Being and Time, it has often been assumed that anxiety, for Heidegger, is the only, or perhaps privileged, fundamental attunement (Grundstimmung) that can be attributed to Dasein.2 However, the publications of the 1924 lecture entitled The Concept of Time, the Contributions to Philosophy (Beitrge), and in particular the 1929 lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, reveal a rather different type of attunement, namely boredom, to be equally, if not even more, signicant with regard to Heideggers analytic of Dasein than anxiety.3 In The Concept of Time, the concept of boredom is relatively undeveloped: it essentially appears as the lengthening and emptying of time manifest in everyday absorption in the present, thus anticipating the existential analysis of falling in Being and Time. Yet in the Beitrge, written in the mid-thirties, what Heidegger calls total boredom has become the hidden goal toward which the modern, techno-scientic epoch is aiming.4 For the author of the Beitrge, boredom, having now replaced anxiety as the attunement that draws the philosophers attention, announces itself as the most adequate, and yet also widespread, form of response to the lack of responsibility that allegedly marks the consummate nihilism of the machine age. In order to understand why this attunement becomes so overwhelmingly consequential in Heideggers mid-thirties assessment of contemporary Dasein, it is necessary, however, to take into account the prolonged discussion of boredom that takes place in the rst part of The Fundamental
1

I would like to thank Simon Critchley and Kristin Gjesdal for their comments on draft versions of this essay. 2 See Heidegger, Being and Time , trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row 1962), especially 40; What Is Metaphysics? in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings , trans. by David Farell Krell (New York: Harper Collins 1993), pp. 93110. 3 See The Concept of Time , trans. William McNeill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 1417; Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) , trans. by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1999), especially 76; The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude , trans. by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1995). 4 Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy , p. 109. British Journal for the History of Philosophy ISSN 0960-8788 print/ISSN 1469-3526 online 2004 BSHP http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09608780410001676494

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Concepts of Metaphysics.5 While boredom in this work bears signicant structural similarities to anxiety, as scrutinized in Being and Time, in that both forms of attunement serve to reveal Dasein to itself, I shall argue that the former category is more attractive in that it largely avoids the ethically unacceptable implications of interpreting the meaning of original temporality, and hence also time, in terms of anxious being-towards-death. Drawing on Levinass objections to Heideggers privileging of resolute Dasein over affectivity and responsivity, the aim is to consider boredom, as outlined by Heidegger, as a condition of possibility of being placed in a relationship of responsibility. Profound boredom, I argue, can be viewed as a marker of exiled, patient Dasein awaiting the call (Anruf ) that draws it to full awareness of its own nitude, and thus to a diachrony of time that suspends its self-possession.

I In a lecture course held at the Sorbonne in 1975/6, God, Death, and Time, Levinas returns to the well-known criticisms of Heidegger that had already been formulated, albeit with less precision, thirty years earlier in Time and the Other.6 While praising Heidegger for his uncovering of the ontological signicance of moods and attunements, he quickly begins to question the interpretation of death that is unfolded in the second part of Being and Time. As Levinas rightly indicates, for Heidegger death is the possibility of the radical impossibility of being-there.7 As such, Daseins being-towarddeath, in its untransferable, exclusive and unsurpassable character, returns Dasein to itself in a position of absolute mineness (Jemeinigkeit): the possibility of impossibility discloses Dasein as a groundless totality, as thrown and ready for its ownmost and uttermost potentiality-for-Being, and ultimately as authentic. By cancelling, like anxiety (in relation to which the category of being-toward-death represents a further rearticulation), all denite engagements and projections, being-toward-death brings Dasein to the abyss of its own freedom as a thoroughly self-interpreting being. As
5

Others who address the concept of boredom in Heideggers lecture course include: Parvis Emad, Boredom as limit and disposition, in Heidegger Studies , vol. 1 (1985), pp. 6378; R. J. A. van Dijk, Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Zur formalanzeigenden Struktur der philosophischen Begriffe bei Heidegger, in Heidegger Studies , vol. 7 (1991), pp. 89109; William McNeill, Metaphysics, Ontology, Methodology, in Heidegger Studies , vol. 8 (1992), pp. 6379. See also Stephen Mulhalls discussions of Heidegger in his Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). 6 See Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time , trans. by Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 2261; Time and the Other and Additional Essays , trans. by Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), chapter 3. The reader may also want to consult Levinass original text, La mort et le temps (Paris: Editions de lHerne, 1991). 7 God, Death, and Time , p. 45.

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279

Levinas highlights his point, the anticipatory being-toward the nothingness of ones own death is not itself temporal; rather, it is being-toward-death that constitutes, or makes possible, the ecstatic movement of original temporality. It is through death, in other words, that there is time and there is Dasein.8 Much of Levinass effort, both in his published lectures and, particularly, in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, has been aimed at the attempt to rethink Heideggers entwining of death, time, and responsibility.9 Why, he asks, does Heidegger fail to thematize the death of the Other? Heidegger certainly accepts that Dasein can die for or sacrice itself for the Other, yet such dying-for can never take the Others death away: death is always emphatically mine, and only as such does it take on an existential relevance.10 By introducing the Other (DAutrui) the face of the Other in its destitute alterity before physical decay and death which Heidegger neglects, Levinas seeks to reverse Heideggers relation between death and time. For Levinas, death is not the condition of possibility of temporality; rather, it is time, as phenomenologically attested to in the experience of hope, the patient turning toward the neighbor, which allows the Other to affect me and thus place me in a relationship of irreplaceable and undeniable responsibility. Time, he writes, is a relationship of deference to what cannot be represented and which, thus, cannot be expressed as this, but which is not indifferent.11 In short, time is an overow of the Same by the Other, an emanation of innity that inscribes itself in the me without any choice or engagement; it is not a function of the tragic, yet also heroic, freedom of ungrounded Dasein facing the possibility of its own death. By restricting his attention to Daseins nitude, Heidegger effectively rejects the whole eld of ethical response; thus his thinking ends in nihilism. My aim here is not to follow the development of Levinass progressive departure from Heidegger. What I would like, rather, is to use Levinass targeting of anxiety and being-toward-death as potentially leading to nihilism in order to approach the problem of boredom in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. What happens when Heideggers call for authenticity and responsibility becomes disconnected from the heroism of anxious being-toward-death and indexed to the attunement of boredom? Can the Heideggerian moment of vision (Augenblick) the authentic selfappropriation of anxious Dasein be desublimized, as it were, and made applicable and relevant to the everyday from which the existential projection of an authentic being-toward-death seems to have banished Dasein? Is a solitude other than individualized Dasein anticipating its own death
8 9

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10 11

Ibid., p. 53. See Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991). Heidegger, Being and Time , p. 284. Levinas, God, Death, and Time , pp. 11516.

, trans. by Alphonso Lingis

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conceivable within the Heideggerian oeuvre? (As far as I know, Levinas never responded to Heideggers 1929 analysis of boredom, which was rst published in German as late as 1983. He does, however, offer his own phenomenology of what he calls fatigue and indolence (la fatigue et la paresse) in the Existence and Existents, an early essay inspired by Blanchot, though in the following I shall disregard this work, which, while bearing certain supercial similarities with Heideggers thinking about boredom, ends up with a very different set of conclusions.12) The Fundamental Problem of Metaphysics is often read in conjunction with What Is Metaphysics?, Heideggers more famous 1929 inaugural lecture, for which it has been seen to form a bit like The History of the Concept of Time in relation to Being and Time the requisite background. This is apt in so far as both works demonstrate an interest in metaphysics, though not as the ontotheological quest for presence that culminates in modern technology, which for the later Heidegger remains a constant object of destruction (Destruktion) and deconstruction, but rather as a comprehensive questioning concerning being as a whole the originary lesa sa utdija. However, The Fundamental Problem of Metaphysics differs substantially from the lecture in that the position from which philosophy is here seen to be able to respond to the problem of being is not the being held out into the Nothing (Hineingehaltenheit in das Nichts) characteristic of anxiety, but the being held in limbo (Hingehaltenheit) of boredom. This is not to deny, though, that Heidegger makes reference to boredom in What is Metaphysics? He does suggest, in a short paragraph, that boredom, like anxiety, holds open the possibility of a revelation of Nothing as the nihilation of every being, yet he does not pursue the analysis any further, and hence the existential distinctness of boredom as opposed to anxiety is lost. How does Heidegger arrive at this being held in limbo? And for what exactly does it prepare? Unlike his introductory treatment of the concept of metaphysics, whose complex and ambiguous trajectory he painstakingly traces from the Greeks to Aquinas, Suarez, Descartes and Fichte, Heidegger resists the temptation to offer a historical or genealogical account of boredom. Although the concept itself, which resonates with motives in the early medieval preoccupation with mystical asceticism (acedia), enjoys a prominent position in the history of Judeo-Christian thought, from Augustine to Ficino, Pascal, Rousseau, and Kierkegaard, he chooses instead to launch an existential, or ontological, investigation. In doing so, his stated aim, rather than to impart disposable knowledge, is to bring the reader into a position from which he may be able to authorize himself as a philosopher, i.e. as someone, as we will see, capable of responsible decision. Since Heidegger renounces all pre-given authority, claiming that the ground of philosophical authority disseminates along with the readers realization that
12

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See Levinas, Existence and Existents , trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1995), pp. 2136, 88.

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the appeal to the a priori remains impossible in these regions of reection, what he calls the fundamental task becomes one of awakening a fundamental attunement which is to sustain our philosophizing.13 The attunement in question is one of which we are to be made aware, which should be brought to consciousness, and yet Heidegger warns against thinking of it as being unconscious. Indeed, if Heidegger may be said to seek to perform something analogous to an existential psychoanalysis on his readers drawing them to his text along the lines of an unassured pathway of transference rather arguing in any straightforward manner then the transformation at stake does not have the character of bringing material from a state of being absent from the possibility of conscious inspection to full awareness, but of permitting the attunement to present itself as itself, i.e. in conformity with phenomenologys ambition, as spelled out in paragraph 7 of Being and Time, to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.14 Associating the making conscious of something with the necessary altering of it, attunements in particular need, as I just quoted, to be awakened; we need, Heidegger writes, to resist letting attunements fall asleep. Not only does the metaphorics of sleep and falling asleep suggest a lack of vigilance; it also points to an active forgetfulness, a desire to escape. Yet that from which Dasein seeks to escape is not some psychological state or other that is experienced as painful, uncomfortable, etc. and which Dasein wants to rid itself of. It is not a mental sensation that can be objectied and encountered as a psychological entity. Nor is it something inner as opposed the outer. Rather, attunements transcendentally determine the being of Dasein. They are, as Heidegger puts it, the fundamental ways in which we nd ourselves disposed in such and such a way.15 As presuppositions and media of thinking and acting, they make up the conditions of possibility of Daseins being as Da-sein (there-being): attunements place us factically in a certain existential situation. Thus, when Dasein fails to face up to an attunement, it in effect turns away from itself; it refuses, in the manner of an evasive turning-away,16 to acknowledge its own fundamental there, the pre-reexive disclosure of its own thrownness and thus beingin-the-world as a whole. Yet how does Heidegger arrive at the contention that boredom constitutes a fundamental attunement, one which is capable of bringing us to the threshold of the most extreme demand (Zumutung) that can be announced to man?17 Echoing the invocation of the fable of Cura in Being and Time,
13 14 15 16

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17

Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics , p. 59. Heidegger, Being and Time , p. 58. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics , p. 67. Being and Time , p. 175. As the reader will have recognized, the characterization of the nature of attunement in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics basically amounts to a rehearsal of the analysis of the existential constitution of the there in Being and Time , pp. 1729. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics , p. 165.

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which pre-ontologically attests to the structure of care (Sorge), in one of the opening sections of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics he quotes another piece of poetic saying, this time a fragment by Novalis: Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere.18 Later on, however, he interprets boredom, at least in its most profound expression, as a form of homesickness. Boredom is the attestation of both wanting to be at home in the world as a whole, while at the same time recognizing ones fateful separation from it the condition of being exiled. Thus philosophy, or rather metaphysics, while seeking to elucidate, lay bare, and ultimately unite itself with the whole, can only exist in the mode of transition, the movement towards, which Heidegger characterizes as nitude. The notion of boredom as an unacknowledged homesickness, and hence boredom as constituting the prerequisite Grundstimmung of philosophy, which occurs in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, nds, as already mentioned, its nal contextual determination, however, in the diagnosis of modernity that is being presented in writings such as Beitrge, The Question Concerning Technology, and Messkirchs Seventh Centennial. Modern technology is such that we can no longer suppose that human beings are in control of it or that they have its measure. The failure of the Ge-stell, the machinery of the techno-scientically organized society, to engage us or appeal to us is experienced as boredom not just in relation to specic objects or events, but in the fact that nothing appeals any longer. In so far, though, as the idea of home, of das heimliche, fails to make itself felt as a contrast to the alien, and hence as meaningful or binding, indifference becomes all-consuming. And with indifference, Dasein rejects responsibility for its own being. This is the point, culturally, or perhaps even epochally, at which an awareness of contemporary Daseins status of being exiled, and therefore as suffering (compare the Weh in Heimweh), needs to be awakened. To awaken the primordial, pervasive attunement of our whole Dasein, Heidegger argues, is a manner and means of grasping Da-sein with respect to the specic way [Weise] in which it is, of grasping Da-sein as Da-sein, or better: of letting Da-sein be as it is, or can be, as Da-sein.19 Heidegger divides the phenomenon of boredom into three forms, each progressively leading onto the next. In the rst form, Dasein nds itself bored by something. Heidegger asks us to imagine someone waiting four hours for the arrival of the next train in the tasteless station of some lonely minor railway,20 where there is nothing to do no books to read, no people with whom one may strike up a conversation except waiting for the time to occur when the train is supposed to arrive. How is time passed in this situation? Passing time here is essentially the same as trying to drive it away or pass it off. Time appears to be both slow and conspicuous: it draws
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Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 93.

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attention to itself in virtue of its deadening drabness and length. Impatiently watching the clock, we may try to go for a short walk or read the timetable, and yet the more we do in order to drive off time, the more directly it seems to oppress us. We are held (hingehalten), Heidegger puts it, in limbo and left empty, unable to immerse ourselves in anything: the environment loses the distinct organization that characterizes active engagement with things.21 It is not as if the station itself is boring: rather, it is the dragging of time which refuses the station the possibility of offering us anything, and hence the station leaves us empty. As opposed to being caused by the station, the boredom we feel is a function of the time in which the station nds itself, namely the wrong time, the time (long) before the train departs. If the station had presented itself in its right time that is, immediately before the train we were waiting for was about to arrive, then this form of boredom would not arise. Being bored by, while always indexed to a concrete situation, thus springs, as will soon be discussed in more detail, from the manner in which temporality temporalizes itself. One may think that this means that time itself, the course of time, is what is boring. Yet time itself does not bore us; it is the essential being held in limbo in coming to be left empty which constitutes the rst form of boredom. In the second form of boredom, which Heidegger characterizes as more profound than the rst, Dasein is bored with something. It is difcult not to sense the Kierkegaardian inspiration of passages such as the following:
We have been invited out somewhere for the evening. We do not need to go along. Still, we have been tense all day, and we have time in the evening. So we go along. There we nd the usual food and the usual table conversation, everything is not only very tasty, but tasteful as well. Afterward people sit together having a lively discussion, as they say, perhaps listening to music, having a chat, and things are witty and amusing. And already it is time to leave. The ladies assure us, not merely when leaving, but downstairs and outside too as we gather to leave, that it really was very nice, or that it was terribly charming. Indeed. There is nothing at all to be found that might have been boring about this evening, neither the conversation, nor the people, nor the rooms. Thus we come home quite satised. We cast a quick glance at the work we interrupted that evening, make a rough assessment of things and look ahead to the next day and then it comes: I was bored after all this evening, on the occasion of this invitation.22
21

22

This claim can only be fully appreciated in the context of Heideggers ontological analysis of equipment, and of how equipmental assignments disclose for Dasein a relational totality of structural signicance, in Being and Time , pp. 91148. Like the disruption of a practice or technique in the workshop, which brings about a transformation of an equipment from the character of readiness-at-hand (Zuhandenheit ) to presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit ), boredom effects a disintegration of the otherwise intimate bond between Dasein and its world of concern: it turns Dasein into a detached spectator . The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics , p. 109.

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Whereas the rst form of boredom permitted the identication of a specic situation or event as boring, in the second, there is nothing determinate that bores us. Everything that took place in the evening party was nice, witty, amusing, and so forth, and hence time, the passing of time, was not, unlike the hours at the desolate train station, felt as pressing or oppressive. The being held in limbo of the second form of boredom is thus without object, and the emptiness is therefore even less tangible and concrete. Of particular interest to Heidegger is the way in which Dasein here may be seen to slip away from itself, toward whatever is taking place. There is participation in the activities taking place, the guest smokes and drinks and enjoys the conversations, and yet Dasein is not present to itself as taking part in those activities. Dasein diffuses itself; it loses the capacity to view itself as an agent. Any account of the evening will tend to take the form of then that happened, and then that happened, and then that, etc. In medias res, this means that the lived now is experienced as indenitely prolonged. As opposed to the impatient counting of seconds and minutes in the rst form of boredom, time here reaches a standstill, a stasis, from which both past and future are evacuated. The condition of being bored with bears obvious analogies with the more familiar phenomenological account of everyday scopophilia in the section on curiosity in Being and Time.23 (In Augustines Confessions, the link between boredom and curiosity, which together are viewed as an essential attestation of the narrators sinfulness, is taken for granted.24) In both cases, there is an abandonment of oneself to the world. While disconnecting fallen Dasein from the responsibility involved in comporting itself in accordance with its essential possibilities of Being, curiosity effects a form of uprooting whereby the seeing itself, rather than tarrying alongside the seen, becomes its own goal. Moving to the epistemic level, the correlate of pure, disengaged seeing is the world as seen that is, as image (Bild), stripped of subjectivity. Qua image, the world exists in a mode which excludes embodiment: for like the soul in Cartesian ontology, the seeing I exists literally beyond the extended world. (In his 1935 lecture course An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger refers to how The eye, the vision, becomes a mere looking at or looking over or gaping at. Vision has degenerated into mere optics (Schopenhauers world eye pure cognition . . .).25) As Heidegger makes it explicit both in Being and Time and repeatedly in the Beitrge, being bored with, in its preoccupation with the givenness of the given, may even be considered the foundation of the theoretical attitude, of theoria as such, as it has been unfolded in the West since the Greeks: Primordial and genuine truth lies in pure beholding. This thesis has remained the
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25

Being and Time , 36. For his interpretation of concupiscentia , see Saint Augustine, Confessions , trans. by R. S. Pine-Cofn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), book 3. See Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics , trans. by Ralph Manheim (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1987), p. 63.

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foundation of western philosophy ever since.26 Indeed, the very interpretation of Being as pure presence (Anwesenheit), where presence is understood in terms of the temporal mode of the Present, the prolonged, self-identical Now, which for Heidegger characterizes the originary movement of forgetfulness that spells the fate of western metaphysics, may itself be thought of as arising from a condition of being bored with. In the age of technology, of Ge-stell or enframing, which is Heideggers name for the essence of technology, the categories of all possible experience are xed by the procedures of instrumental reason and large-scale social organization (machination), the private correlate of which is the empty lived-experience of entertainment and distraction. The essential withdrawal of Being thus coincides with a state of total boredom.27 It may seem as if Daseins being bored with has taken us to the negative limit of Daseins self-abandonment and self-effacement. At least from within the perspective of Being and Time (provided it is correct to map being bored with on to the phenomenological analysis of falling Daseins disclosure of its there), since it marks the consummation of inauthenticity, the investigation can be taken no further. If we return, however, to the analysis in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, it is clear that Heidegger wants to introduce yet another form of boredom, namely what he calls profound boredom or it is boring for one (es ist einem langweilig). In this third kind of boredom, as suggested by the impersonality of the it (as in it is raining), we reach a state of complete indifference. On the one hand, as Dasein withdraws its interest, the world and others in it become entirely distant, indeterminate, and unengaging. Everything, he writes, is made out to be of equally great and equally little worth, hence valuing itself, the very capacity to draw distinctions on the basis of worth, yields to a grey plenum of impoverishment. Nothing seems capable of making a claim on Dasein, or make a difference to it. On the other hand, and even more alarmingly, the self, who one is, with all its commonly recognizable traits, loses its distinctness: Name, standing, vocation, role, age and fate as mine and yours disappear.28 In terms reminiscent of symptomatologies of severe mental disorders, Heidegger even talks about being relieved of ones everyday personality, that is, of a kind of ecstasies, a standing apart from oneself whereby all everyday self-knowledge is bracketed or suspended. Clearly, the emptiness involved in profound boredom is different from that of the two rst instances of it. It is not the emptiness (at the train station) that lacks a particular fulllment. Nor is it that (at the evening party) of letting oneself go with the particular beings in a particular situation. Rather, it is an emptiness by which we do not expect anything from our surroundings, by which the world has fallen dead.
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Being and Time , p. 215. See Contributions to Philosophy , p. 109. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics

, p. 135.

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The emptiness, however, of profound boredom should not be identied with the Nothing: it cannot be brushed off as an illusion or simply a pathological state from which one needs to recuperate. Rather, the emptiness amounts to a positive refusal; it has a phenomenological signicance. But a refusal of what? In Heideggers account, what Dasein is being refused in profound boredom is its own possibilities of doing and acting. Profound boredom deprives Dasein of the very possibility of possibility; it therefore returns, and this is the crux of Heideggers Umschlag, Dasein to itself as a being which exists as its own possibility. By stripping Dasein of its everyday attachments, it brings Dasein face to face with its own responsibility for its own being. As Heidegger puts it, this it is boring for one rst brings the self in all its nakedness to itself as the self that is there and has taken over the being-there of its Da-sein. For what purpose? To be that Da-sein.29 Dasein, one might put it, is placed in a relationship of responsibility; the consummated emptiness of profound boredom reveals Dasein as answerable for everything and for everyone. Heidegger uses several expressions to characterize the almost paradoxical announcement that is being made in the telling refusal of beings as a whole. He refers to it as a calling (Anruf ), yet also as the most extreme demand (Zumutung), and at times even as terror or mystery the latter being sentiments he, echoing Nietzsches critique of decadence, nds modern man curiously indisposed towards.30 Profound boredom thus produces the possibility for what he, both in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics and Being and Time, and following Kierkegaard, calls the moment of vision (Augenblick), i.e., the look of resolute disclosedness [Blick der Entschlossenheit] in which the full situation of an action opens itself and keeps itself open.31 If transposed onto the dimension of time, which now can be seen as the underlying condition of possibility of profound boredom, it is clear that the category of Augenblick is grounded in the appeal to a reappropriation of Daseins original temporality. As Heidegger develops his analysis, the Augenblick signies the momentary collapse or overcoming of the entrancement (Bann) that time confers on Dasein in profound boredom. In being pushed to the pinnacle of its own domination over Dasein, times entrancing, placing Dasein before itself in the mode of an absolute emptiness, impels Dasein into the extremity of its proper essence, i.e., toward the realization of its own radical groundlessness as a free being that is and has to be. Profound boredom thus individualizes Dasein as a nite being before the world as a totality, and hence it places us at the origin of all the questions of metaphysics, and ultimately in the position of exiled homesickness of which Novalis speaks.

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29 30 31

Ibid., p. 143. Ibid., pp. 143, 165, 172. Ibid., p. 149.

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II Having outlined Heideggers analysis of boredom in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, I now want to return to the issues that were broached at the beginning of the previous section. In particular, I would like to address Levinass critical implication that Heideggers account of Augenblick amounts to a self-project a care of the self, to use Foucaults expression that effectively excludes the-one-for-the-other of ethical responsibility. My guiding hypothesis is certainly not that Heidegger in this respect may be said to be similar to Levinas. Nor do I want to argue that Heideggers 1929 analysis of boredom actually anticipates Levinas. The conjecture I want to pursue is rather that Levinass critique of Heidegger ought to be rethought in light of this analysis. For Levinas, the fundamental problem of Heideggers conception of authentic response, or responsibility, consists in the way it is being linked to ones own death, that is, to the temporal structure of being-toward-death. Like Adorno, who in the Negative Dialectics reproaches Heidegger for falsely presupposing the possibility of an epic death a death that connects Dasein to an alleged epic totality of being comprising both life and death Levinas sees the totality that opens up in the Heideggerian Augenblick as devoid of any possible reference to the Other, or indeed to anything that would exceed the existential boundaries of Daseins authentic selfprojection.32 Time, for his Heidegger, is a projection of being or Dasein toward its end; it excludes, from the outset, any irruption from the outside, and therefore any meaningful waiting. As such, the scandal of death, and of nitude in general, cannot be thought in its full radicality. Instead, death, ones own envisioned possibility of non-being, becomes a pretext for Daseins own transcendence of the everyday being-with. Now the state-of-mind that most primordially reveals to Dasein its own throwness into death is anxiety:
Anxiety in the face of death is anxiety in the face of that potentiality-forBeing which is ones ownmost, non-relational, and not to be outstripped. . . . This anxiety is not an accidental or random mood of weakness in some individual; but, as a basic state-of-mind of Dasein, it amounts to the disclosedness of the fact that Dasein exists as thrown Being towards its end.33

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If being-toward-death drops out as the essential temporal marker of resolute self-appropriation, and with it anxiety, then what would Heideggers analysis look like from a Levinasian perspective if profound boredom is substituted for anxiety? For one thing, as the very relation to ones own death is no longer operative, the claim that Heidegger, by virtue
32

33

See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics , trans. by E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), pp. 36870. Being and Time , p. 295.

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of the privileged role he assigns to ones own death, necessarily is debarred from thematizing the death of the Other, and hence that genuine ethical response is precluded a priori, can no longer be sustained. To be sure, Heidegger does not take any positive steps in that direction in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. The reference, however, in Being and Time, to the friend whose authenticity acts as what Stephen Mulhall has called a boot-strap on Dasein, aiming it towards a responsible self-appropriation, may be considered a hint in this direction.34 (The passage appears in the discussion of hearing as a primary and authentic way in which Dasein is open for its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, where Heidegger talks of hearing the voice of the friend whom every Dasein carries with it.35) More important, though, is the nature of the demand itself to which man must resolutely respond. For Heidegger, this demand transpires from the actual oppressiveness of Dasein as a whole, which is experienced in profound boredom, and it places Dasein in a relation of unrestricted and acknowledged responsibility for its own being. As in Levinas, there is, one might therefore say, a fundamental Anruf, a calling, which properly grounds the responsible subject (the Dasein in us), and even though this call does not issue from the Other, its anarchic origin exceeds the boundaries of possible objectication and thematization. Indeed, Heidegger emphasizes that the Anruf should most denitely not be interpreted as a report or a statement; rather, it is characterized as a telling announcement or a calling of possibilities as such that arises from the anonymity of indifferent being as a whole.36 According to Miguel de Beistegui, Heideggers invocation of a call for someone capable of instilling terror [Schrecken] into our Dasein again37 may be viewed as announcing a shift of interest from the early analyses of existential facticity to a more historically, or rather epochally, oriented openness in the mid-thirties, and ultimately to the other beginning of the history of being itself.38 Most crucially yet also worrying, however, it seems to anticipate the steely political rhetoric displayed in the notorious Rectoral Address, in which the Fhrer is gured as the historical embodiment of the destiny of the German people, and as such as being in possession of the voice of terror capable of waking people from their false sense of needlessness (Notlosigkeit). While de Beisteguis reading is suggestive, it fails to take into account that Heideggers employment of the term Schrecken in the 1929 lecture course appears within the context of his extended discussion of
34

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35 36 37 38

See Stephen Mulhall, Heidegger and Being and Time (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 1306. Being and Time , p. 206. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics , p. 143. Ibid., p. 172. See Miguel de Beistegui, Boredom: Between Existence and History: On Heideggers Pivotal The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics , in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology , vol. 31 (2000), pp. 14558 and in particular pp. 1556.

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the Versagen of being as a whole that is made manifest from the depths of the boundless emptiness of profound boredom. With this consideration in mind, it seems more plausible to interpret the someone capable of instilling Schrecken as an allusion, though perhaps not entirely effective, to the paradoxical telling that takes place in boredoms refusal of being. The sagen in Versagen is capable of instilling terror because it awakens Dasein from its own tempting dispossession and disowning, and makes it free for its own ungroundedness and hence freedom. Like Freuds return of the repressed heimliche as unheimlich, the discovery of Daseins transcendence arises from within a condition of incomprehensibility and dislocation.39 Looking back on the development of the Marburg phenomenology, an important implication of the reading I suggest here is that the meaning of resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) seems to undergo a metamorphosis. In Being and Time, the state of openness (Erschlossenheit) is revealed in Dasein by the effective situation of anxiety, that is, by the understanding as self-projection upon ones ownmost guilt which announces the Gewissenhaben-wollen, the will-to-have-a-conscience. On the basis of this encounter with ones own conscience, resoluteness appears as the most genuine and authentic form of disclosedness:
This distinctive and authentic disclosedness, which is attested in Dasein itself by its conscience this reticent self-projection upon ones ownmost Beingguilty, in which one is ready for anxiety we call resoluteness. Resoluteness is a distinctive mode of Daseins disclosedness. In an earlier passage, however, we have interpreted disclosedness existentially as the primordial truth. Such truth is primarily not a quality of judgment nor of any denite way of behaving, but something essentially constitutive for Being-inthe-world as such. Truth must be conceived as the fundamental existentiale. . . . In resoluteness we have now arrived at that truth of Dasein which is most primordial because it is authentic.40

If we compare this passage from Being and Time with the claims being made about resoluteness in the 1929 lecture course, it is striking how this concept, rather than being characterized in terms of a care of the self, or self-project, now comes to denote an openness toward the announcement that places Dasein in demand, and hence constitutes its responsibility. For the Heidegger of the lecture course, being gripped by the act of metaphysical questioning presupposes a weakening of Dasein to the point of
39

40

Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, in Art and Literature , trans. by James Strachey (The Penguin Freud Library, No. 14, London 1990), pp. 33976. Being and Time , p. 343. The reader might want to compare my reading of this passage with that of Jacques Taminiaux, Kants Thesis on Being and the Phenomenology of Perception, Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology , trans. by Michael Gendre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 109.

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total self-renunciation, for only through the passivity or disinterestedness of the subject can the summoning of oneself as irreplaceable, which signies responsibility, be achieved. It is tempting to bring this line of thought to bear on Levinas, who in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence speaks of an anarchic trauma suffered prior to any auto-identication, in an unrepresentable before.41 For Levinas, there is a passivity prior to all receptivity that calls the subject into a being-for-the-other. Clearly, Heidegger never suggests that the Anruf itself arises from the Other, or rather from our exposure to the Other. In his account, the exposure to transcendence is, as we have seen, an exposure to the telling refusal of beings as a whole, that is, to a world that has sunk into complete indifference, and hence in which Dasein is no longer placed before any concrete nite task or being: it is not an exposure toward the neighbor, even though the neighbor, for Levinas, presents himself diachronously as an innition of the innite, as glory,42 and not in any sense as an empirical Other.43 Yet the malady of identity, the overwhelming of the order of the thematizable being in the said, is quite similar in both authors, and it is certainly markedly different in both tone and emphasis from the far more voluntarist conception of openness (Erschlossenheit) that we nd in Being and Time. While formerly a function of Daseins anxious self-projection upon his ownmost Being-guilty, Erschlossenheit, and therefore also the moment of vision, is now (i.e. in the 1929 lecture course) linked to the possibility of dwelling in the exposure to the enigma of Daseins nitude. Only thus can Dasein hold itself toward a projection that binds it and makes possible that dawning of the everyday in which at rst and for the most part we catch sight of beings, cope with them, suffer from them, and enjoy ourselves with them.44 In profound boredom, the temporal horizon shrinks, as it were, to the point of excluding both past and future in favor of an unarticulated unity that may either be owned or disowned, and from which resoluteness, embracing all three ecstasies of time with a priority on the future, may stem. The primary site of truth is thus no longer Daseins coming to self concerning its ownmost possibility but the achievement of nitudes irruptive between taking place in openness as such, the original taking something as something of projection of which Heidegger speaks at the end of the course.
41 42 43

Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence , p. 123. Ibid., p. 93. Compare Jacques Derridas succinct remark in The Gift of Death , trans. by David Wills (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 46: Levinas wants to remind us that responsibility is not at rst responsibility of myself for myself, that the sameness of myself is derived from the other, as if it were second to the other, coming to itself as a responsible and mortal from the position of my responsibility before the other, for the others death and in the face of it.

44

The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics

, p. 364.

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What kind of time is this? Invoking Nietzsches Zarathustra, Heidegger refers to man, thrown in his throw, and therefore essentially absent,45 as a transition. But what kind of transition? According to Levinas, the time of Being and Time can only be that of being-toward-death from which tobe-out-ahead-of-oneself is necessarily dependent on a projection toward the possibility of no longer being-in-the-world. Put differently though in a somewhat simplied vein, time is a projection of being toward its end. Indeed, originary time, in Levinass reading of the early Heidegger, is understood on the basis of the nothingness revealed in anxious anticipation of death, and hence temporality is dened by the relationship with nothingness.46 For this reason a supreme value is set on being as such, or rather on the desire to be, which translates into the popular perception of the loneliness of Heideggerian man. In Levinass Heidegger, then, even though the future, the movement of authentic projection as such, is dened as the primordial axis of time, time essentially excludes hope; the time of Dasein is tragic, it involves an essential disappointment against which no eternity can be opposed:
If existence is a comportment with regard to the possibility of existence, and if it is total in its existence with regard to this possibility, then it cannot but be toward- or for-death. If being is to-being, being is being-toward death. To-beout-ahead-of-oneself is precisely to-be-toward-death (if being-toward-death is abolished, then being-out-ahead-of-oneself is suppressed at the same time, and Dasein is no longer a totality). This, then, is how man is considered in his totality, how Dasein is at every moment whole: in its relationship to death.47

Again, it is rewarding to consider the extent to which yet another one of Levinass criticisms of Heidegger loses its edge when applied to the 1929 context of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. For if we return, nally, to the temporality of profound boredom, we see that, rather than reiterating the potentially nihilistic movement in Being of Time of anticipating ones own nothingness, the attunement of It is Boring for One is better described as a form of patience (anticipating, perhaps, the Gelassenheit of the later writings), of an awaiting without anything specic being awaited, in short an openness which, in the moment of vision, can be transformed into an explicit acknowledgment of responsibility. In profound boredom, the very structure of intentionality, including its temporality of being-ahead-of-oneself, collapses and leaves Dasein stripped of everything but its own nitude its untransferable responsibility for its own being. Here, the recognition that Dasein is a separate or, as Heidegger puts it, solitary being, and hence exiled and suffering in Novaliss sense of Heimweh, reaches its point of culmination.
45 46 47

Ibid., p. 366. God, Death, and Time Ibid., p. 53.

, p. 93.

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At this juncture, Heidegger turns to (pseudo-)Aristotles Problemata and introduces a notion of melancholy (Schwermut). For Aristotle, Heidegger points out, melancholy is a condition of creativity; it is to be found, he argues, in all men, including Empedocles, Socrates, and Plato, who have achieved exceptional things. Melancholy is in other words a distinctive characteristic of the ethos-peritton, the great personality. And yet Heidegger is not simply referring his readers to the age-old assumption of there being a relation between melancholy and creation; he clearly seeks to position melancholy within the constellation of concepts that we have already encountered: Heimweh, profound boredom, solitude, and nitude. But how exactly is that to be done? In what sense is Heidegger entitled to interpret profound boredom in the light of melancholy? And how does this interpretation bear on the issues of waiting and patience? As Gillian Rose has rightly pointed out, the whole discourse of Levinas, including the requirement on the part of the self to become devastated, traumatized, unenthroned, indeed to substitute the other for itself, is unfolded in a melancholy mood.48 Turning to psychoanalytic accounts of mourning and melancholy (Freud, Abraham and Klein), it is not difcult to see the justication for this attribution. According to Freuds classical paper Mourning and Melancholia, whereas mourning is a reaction to loss whereby libidinal investment is recathected, thus liberating the ego from the deadly xation on the lost object, melancholy conceals an aggressiveness toward the lost object, thus revealing the ambivalence of the depressed person with respect to the object of mourning.49 The melancholic imbeds the lost object in herself so as not to lose it. However, since the love for the object has been effected on a narcissistic basis, which places the self in a relationship both of identication and aggression, it ends up devalorizing itself with the same passion as it formerly valorized the object. As is the case in Levinass concept of persecution, of being persecuted by the other, the psychic malady of melancholy is therefore potentially innite: it knows no work of mourning, no positive or symbolic law to be acknowledged; all it knows is an innite self-divestiture and selfnegation before the divine and violent Other with whom the ego identies. It is precisely in the recognition of this innite debt that the Messianic spirit the promise of promises, originary and deferred of Levinas comes to the fore. In the note to Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, Derrida reduces (in the Husserlian sense of transcendental bracketing) Heideggers heterogeneous origin to the event of a promise, a promise prior to all the testaments, all the promises, all the events, all the laws and assignments which
48

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49

See Gillian Rose,MourningBecomestheLaw:PhilosophyandRepresentation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 367. Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, in On Metapsychology , trans. by James Strachey (The Penguin Freud Library, No. 11, London 1991), pp. 25760.

HEIDEGGER ON PATIENCE AND MELANCHOLY 293

are our very memory.50 Would it be possible to inscribe Heideggers analysis of boredom within such a logic of the promise? Clearly, the time of melancholy and profound boredom, rather than being anticipatory in any teleological sense, is a time of an ambiguous refusal. In profound boredom, when time entrances Dasein, beings as a whole refuse themselves, and yet in their refusal their negation of every determinate project or decision there is, as we have seen, a Sagen, i.e. a making manifest. What kind of performative is being performed by this Sagen? We have seen that it does not come across as an assertion. Nor can the Sagen be described as a command: for as a command, it could only qualify as binding on Dasein, or indeed be recognized as such, in so far as Dasein had already been placed in a relationship of responsibility. However, Daseins responsibility for itself is not made constitutive until the resolute self-disclosure of the moment of vision itself. As an Anruf, the Sagen is best thought of, I would argue, as a request or an invitation. It invites Dasein to take over the being-there of its Da-sein. Yet all invitations contain a promise, or rather the temporal structure of a promise. To invite someone is to hold open the possibility of some kind of fulllment; it is to single someone out and to offer her a space for revealing herself as the one she is. And rather than commanding the addressee to accept the invitation, it leaves her free either to enter into the relation of self-revelation or refuse it. Since the invitation in this case involves the totality of Daseins being, it can be said to imply not only a particular promise, but, as Derrida intimates, an archi-promise a promise that makes all other promises possible. If Dasein shies away from this promise, it means that it returns, in a state of mourning, to the fallen everyday of work and relationships. It returns, in short, to the allegedly neutralizing world of technological civilization wherein the irreplaceable uniqueness of the responsible self gets cancelled. However, if it accepts the invitation, it enters into a relationship with a law, a nomos, that demands innite responsibility. It thus brings itself, though without any hope of a possible return from solitude, into a melancholia that respects the untranslatable relation of law and work. If we take a step back from this attempt to elaborate and extend Heideggers analysis, it becomes apparent that the question of boredom, as a fundamental attunement, leads to a rather different plane of possible consequences and implications than the question of anxious being-towarddeath, which dominates Being and Time. While the ethical upshot of profound boredom remains unclear, at least from a Levinasian point of view, I hope to have shown that there is reason to believe that the futurity of such boredom does not entail the unwanted nihilistic consequences of the (non-)futurity of being-toward-death. Far removed from what we ordinarily understand by boredom, profound boredom, in the Heideggerian
50

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Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question , trans. by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), p. 107.

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sense, opens a time of non-thematic patience and awaiting and ultimately of exposure toward the innite. Time, as experienced within this framework, thus promises the creation, the coming-to-be, of Dasein. University of Essex BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Rose, Gillian, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Taminiaux, Jacques, Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology, trans. by Michael Gendre, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. van Dick, R. J. A, Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Zur formalanzeigenden Struktur der philosophischen Begriffe bei Heidegger, in Heidegger Studies 7 (1991): 89109.

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