Heidegger’s boredom

SUPSOC Seminar Series – A seminar by Christos Hadjioannou

Wednesday, 22 January 2014, Fulton 213, University of Sussex

Abstract:• Martin Heidegger is, along with Ludwig Wittgenstein, the most

influential philosopher of the 20th century. There are many ways in which Heidegger revolutionized philosophy and contributed to the emergence of the major philosophical tradition of “phenomenology”. One of his original contributions was the way he understood, and the role he ascribed to, the affective level of experience (‘affect’ in the sense of feeling or mood). According to Heidegger, we shall never have comprehended fundamental philosophical concepts unless we have first been gripped by whatever they are supposed to comprehend: all such being gripped happens to us while we are undergoing a feeling or mood, and it occurs by way of that mood. Philosophical comprehension arises always necessarily from the fundamental moods [Grundstimmungen], which for Heidegger attune us to what is as a whole of Dasein, (Heidegger’s early name for the human being). Philosophy in each case happens in a fundamental mood.

• In his magnum opus, Being and Time, he identified anxiety or ‘Angst’ as the fundamental mood that revealed the way the Dasein is “held out into the Nothing”. Later though, during the lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude Heidegger identified boredom as the fundamental mood through which we gain access to these fundamental concepts of ‘world’, ‘finitude’ and ‘solitude’. Boredom is also identified by Heidegger as “the concealed destination” of the era of modern science. In this talk, we shall examine some of the main arguments that Heidegger makes concerning boredom, and try to gain an initial, provisional, understanding of what boredom is, what it reveals, and how it reveals it.

Moods disclose the foundations of Dasein • The archē of ancient Greek philosophy, of philosophy

indeed, is wonder [θαυμάζειν; Wunder]. Why is there Something/Being rather than Nothing?

• Wonder gripped Plato and Aristotle, and through wonder they understood their World, and conceptualized their metaphysics.

• Many moods are named by Heidegger as crucial for philosophy: ēros [ἔρως], nostalgia (homesickness)[Novalis], Angst (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre), joy, reservedness, shock, diffidence and astonishment. But two of them stand out in H’s works: Angst and Boredom.

What are fundamental moods?• Fundamental moods Vs minor moods: Fundamental are those

that are inherently to “metaphysics”. They are moods that are attached/belong to a “metaphysical system”, i.e. a set of concepts that try to make sense of the “World” as a whole, the foundational principles of meaning, etc.

• In his magnum opus, Being and Time, Heidegger identified Angst as the fundamental mood that reveals the Nothing as the truth of Dasein. Angst revealed the way the Dasein is “being held out into the Nothing” [Hineingehaltenheit in das Nichts] and thus the meaning of being as (finite) time. Angst reveals to the Dasein its own finitude.

An overview of what boredom is for Heidegger

• A mood is neither subjective nor objective, but a hybrid of the two• Boredom is the concealed fundamental mood of our era• Boredom is identified by Heidegger as “the concealed destination”

of the era of modern science • Through boredom we gain access to the fundamental metaphysical

concepts of ‘world’, ‘finitude’ and ‘solitude’ • Boredom has two structural interconnected moments: it manifests

Dasein (our existence) as being held in limbo [Hingehaltenheit] and as being left empty [Leergelassenheit], being refused of things around us.

• Both of the above structural moments are only possible because of the experience of dragging of time [zögernde Zeit], being bound to time. Ultimately, boredom is a distinct attunement to time. Through analysing boredom we are faced with the enigma of time.

Some important linguistic remarks• Mood in German is “Stimmung”. Sometimes

translated as “attunement”, sometimes as “mood”. I prefer mood.

• Stimme = voice• Gestimmt = (musically) tuned• Verstimmt = out of tune, upset, “moody”• Stimmen (verb) = to vote, to agree, to tune• Boredom in German is “Langeweile”. • Literally = Long-while. [Lange = long, weile = while]

Concealed moods• Philosophy in each case happens in a fundamental mood. It is

grounded in a fundamental mood. • Conceptual comprehending and philosophizing is not some

arbitrary enterprize alongside others, but happens in the ground [Grunde] of human Dasein. Philosophical comprehension arises always necessarily out of fundamental moods [Grundstimmungen] of Dasein.

• Fundamental moods are of the kind that constantly, essentially, and thoroughly attune human beings, without human beings necessarily always recognizing them as such.

• A fundamental mood can be there, and yet remain unrecognized.• It is not “invented”. It is already there, and yet hidden from us,

even if it is ours. (Hermeneutic principle: the closest is the farthest- Nietzsche)

• Mood is not a thing: it is not an object. Cannot be observed or ascertained: we can only “awaken” it [we’ ll return to this soon]

• Some moods are really hard to “grasp”: they are there as fundamental moods, but conceal themselves. These are the trickiest ones, and the most powerful.

• Moods that go unnoticed make us feel “as though there is no mood at all” (cf. Being and Time)

• Some fundamental moods “attack us”: i.e. wonder. Other moods, like Angst and boredom give us the tendency to “shake them off” in our everydayness. Thus, they conceal themselves and do not allow us to identify them as the fundamental mood that is already there. These moods are difficult to be made “essential”.

• How do we gain access to these powerful, concealed moods? How do we sense them as essential and fundamental?

Awakening a fundamental mood• In order to reveal and reconnect with our fundamental

attunement, a fundamental comportment [Verhaltung] is demanded: i.e. the way we comport ourselves and relate to the mood, the pre-reflective level of the situation

• Philosophy is a comportment then. It is the way we relate to the foundations of our situation [cf. reality, state-of-affairs]

• Heidegger takes Plato as the example of what kind of relation comportment is: “Plato says in one of his major dialogues that the difference between the philosophizing human being and the one who is not philosophizing is the difference between being awake (ὕπαρ) and sleeping (ὄναρ).” (FCM, p.23)

• Understanding philosophically our concepts involves a certain awakening of what is already there sleeping. The first task is to awaken the fundamental mood that forms the questions

• It cannot be a “bringing into consciousness what is unconscious” because consciousness explicates in the manner of making something an object of knowledge. Too theoretical, reflective, an approach.

• We must in fact avoid consciously thinking of mood: making conscious means destroying the mood as mood.

• “Consciousness” weakens and alters a mood. Thus, the paradigm of sleep/awake is more appropriate. This notion of awakening a mood requires a reconception of human and what it means to “know” herself: not through “consciousness”

• Awake a mood: let it be. Let it show itself. • But if the fundamental mood is sleeping, concealed, how do we

know that it is there, how do we decide which mood to awaken?• Follow the indications.

Indication of concealed fundamental mood in contemporary Dasein

• We need to awaken a fundamental attunement in our philosophizing (epochality of philosophy)

• Feelings and moods constantly change, as do ideas within a given period. However, the ground subsists for a longer period of time: each philosophical epoch has a fundamental mood that pervades it

• We need to know our philosophical situation then. Highlighte the unitary character of the way our situation has been presented in philosophy.

• Heidegger identifies a certain unifying contemporary theme: “the decline of the West”: the decline of life through spirit: a spirit, as ratio which created technology, economy, world trade, the big city, which turns against life.

• Nietzsche sums up the current prognosis of culture: the life Vs spirit strife, the categories of life and spirit locate the setting [Stelle] of the situation. Technological spirit dominates culture: it sets out man, but never his/her Dasein. “Absence of mood”: as if there is no fundamental mood

• Philosophy of culture fails to get a hold of us. As if an indifference yawns at us. An indifference of unknown ground. Perhaps, asks Heidegger, because we have become bored with ourselves?

• Contemporary technological culture will become central: a point of entry. An indication of a fundamental boredom.

Becoming bored by something

• We still don’t know if boredom pervades us in this time

• But isn’t the essence of boredom precisely, a mood that exists in the form of being evaded?

• Perhaps focusing on this we may get an entry, a way to awaken, boredom: focus on the way we escape boredom. If we identify that, boredom may be acknowledged

Distinction between being bored and becoming bored

• Distinction between being bored and becoming bored: In being bored we are no longer attached to that which is boring, even though it is still there at hand. It feels as if boredom came from us and continued to propagate itself: a strange horizon over and beyond that thing that is boring: everything is boring.

• In becoming bored, we are still held fast [festgehalten] by that which is boring, we are still bound to it. It’s more appropriate to methodologically begin with the phenomenon of becoming bored.

“Becoming bored”: how is it manifested?

• Entering into an originary relationship with boredom is tough, and it cannot be directly observed or transposed into.

• But we know that boredom is one of those moods that are very uncomfortable for us, something we do not wish to let arise, something that we immediately try to drive away when it arise.

• Opposition to boredom involves an impression of itself upon us: “Precisely wherever we are opposed to it, boredom itself must want to assert itself, and wherever it presses to the fore in such a way, it must impress itself upon us in it essence”

• The way we resist becoming bored, reveals the essence of becoming bored

• We first “have it” precisely when we are involved in driving it away!

Becoming bored: not causal. Boredom: neither objective nor subjective

• Before we analyse the way we resist and drive away boredom while becoming bored, let’s see how this relation cannot be grasped in a causal, naturalized, manner, nor as a subjective or objective entity.

• Starting from that which is boring, “boringness” is not starting from the mood per se. Boringness is not boredom.

• Something boring: a thing, a person, an event. Let’s see some things that are boring (Heidegger’s favourite example is the train station: waiting for a train at the train station)

• A hermeneutic triangle: a) that which is boring; b) becoming bored by this thing; c) boredom itself

• Boringness does not come from the subject: The boring thing does not receive its objective characteristic of boringness from the subject: boringness is not a matter of transference (μεταφορά- Aristotle) because the question of why do we transfer this “subjective” mood to the object is because we assume that it is the cause of the boredom in us.

• This approach treats the mood as an effect, and thus the answer to the question of what is the cause of this boredom in the subject in the first place refers back to the object as cause: so the mood is taken to be an apprehension from the thing itself.

• Boringness does not come from the object: Boredom cannot be the objective property of boringness in an object, because of the very definition of boring, which belongs to the object and yet presupposes a relation to the subject.

• Definition of boring=wearisome, tedious; it does not stimulate and excite, it does not give anything, it does not concern us in any way. Therefore, even the objective properties relate to the subject. The essential definition here of boring lies precisely in its relation to the subject, the way the subject is affected or not affected

• Neither the objective definition of boredom, nor the subjective, is stable or suffices. The “problem is precisely this relatedness, its fundamental character”. (Hint: Time will be the key).

• Let’s move on to how becoming bored manifests itself

Avoiding becoming bored

• As we already said: entering a relationship with the phenomenon of becoming bored involves looking at how we avoid becoming bored.

• How do we oppose then boredom? The diversion from boredom is when we “pass the time”

• Passing the time [Zeitvertreiben] as an indication, as the way we encounter boredom undisguised. Passing the time: vertreiben also meaning/translated as: spend (time), kill (time), divert (time), distract (time).

• “Thus it is precisely in passing the time that we first gain the correct orientation [die rechte Haltung] in which we encounter boredom undisguised” (p. 91)

• In passing the time, we are still held fast by that which is boring• Imagine the train station, waiting for the train to come. We start

becoming bored. We try to oppose that by trying to propel time, make it pass, because what we really want is boredom to pass. We keep counting trees while we wait for the train at the train station etc. We constantly look at the clock. Passing time means: to drive away, shake off, boredom. “Passing the time is a driving away of boredom that drives time on” (p. 93)

• Boredom is not just waiting though. (We can wait without becoming bored).

• Passing the time is a confrontation with time. Surely then there must be relation between boredom and time. In boredom, Lange-weile, time peculiarly remains there and we are trying to make that pass. We keep looking at the station clock.

The time of boredom

• We often look at the clock. In confronting this time we want to make it pass more quickly, because it is going too slowly. Is time the issue then? Is time, in general, the problem? Time taking up everything?

• But boredom is not time: In boredom, time is not the object. In boredom we are not bound by time, or any other thing. On the contrary, in boredom we are bound precisely by – nothing! That is the problem. Becoming bored is a peculiar being affected in a paralysing way by time as it drags and oppresses us in its own way.

• What is this oppression then of boredom? Boredom holds us in limbo [hinhält]. This reveals a new enigmatic aspect of time.

• Passing time is a form of diversion. From what? From an oppression: the oppression of the dragging of time [zögernde Zeit] [procrastinating, pausing, time]. The dragging of time oppresses us by holding us in limbo.

• When we pass time, we do not pass time in general. Only a particular time: the interval between trains; the stupid conversation of a date; a commercial on tv; the downloading of a movie or a website etc.

• We try to pass the particular time that drags and holds us in limbo. A particular time. What about the particularity of this time? What is its particularity and what kind of relation to the surrounding things, the particular event, the situation, the world, does it reveal and/or entail?

Being held in limbo: being left empty by the refusal of things

• In passing time, we are not interested either in the object nor in the result of the activity, but in being occupied as such.

• Being occupied with things gives our dealings a certain direction, fullness. In being occupied with things we are also taken by them [hingenommen], if not altogether lost in them, captivated [benommen] by them.

• By implication, being left in limbo is identified as being left empty [Leergelassenheit]

• Being left empty? Left with nothing? That is impossible. Things are always there present-at-hand, at our disposal. (A boring thing is still not nothing).

• Although things are at hand, they leave us empty. Actually, precisely because they are at hand in a particular way, we are left empty, they bore us. The way they are present and yet leave us completely in peace [lassen uns völlig in Ruhe]. They refuse themselves to us, in a certain anticipated way.

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The refusal of the train station

• The example of the train station: the station at hand refuses itself to us, leaves us empty because the train that belongs to it has not yet arrived, so that there is such a long time that drags on until the arrival of the train. The train station does not offer what it ought to be offering (according to our expectations).

• The dragging of time refuses the station the possibility of offering us anything. It forces it to leave us empty. “The station refuses itself, because time refuses it something” (p. 105)

Boredom reveals: Each thing has “its” proper time

• It is not time itself that bores us, the mere course of time. Becoming bored is the essential being held in limbo in coming to be left empty.

• Things can only be held in limbo and have time dragging and refuse themselves to us only if they are bound to time in a particular, peculiar, way

• Becoming bored is structurally connected to the enigma of time

• Boredom “is only possible at all because each thing, as we say, has its time. If each thing did not have its time, then there would be no boredom”

• Boredom reveals how each thing has “its” time. Beyond objective or subjective conceptions of time.

• Boredom arises out of things not “having” their “proper” time.

• Thanks for listening and I’ll be happy to respond to any question