127

§26 [191-192]

empty and being held in limbo. These are not two pieces arbitrarily stuck together; rather, letting ourselves go in this peculiar chattering away is a making present of whatever is taking place. Wholly present, we bring time to a stand. The time that has come to a stand forms an emptiness that irrupts against the background of everything that is happening. At the same time, however, it is this self-forming emptiness that sets us in place, binds us to itself, holds us in limbo in this way as our own proper self that we ourselves have left standing and from which we slip away.

The structural unity of the two structural moments is grounded in a making-present that brings the time taken to a stand. The unitary essence of boredom in the sense of the unitary structure of the two moments must therefore be sought in time after all. Not merely in time in general and universally, however, not only in time as we know it, but in the manner and way in which we stand with respect to the time that is familiar, in the manner and way in which this time stands into our Dasein and in which our Dasein itself is temporal. Boredom springs from the temporality of Dasein. Boredom therefore, we may say in anticipation, arises from a quite determinate way and manner in which our own temporality temporalizes itself This tallies with the thesis that we announced earlier, namely that boredom is possible only because every thing, and more fundamentally every Dasein as such, has its time.


§27. Concluding characterization of being bored with
something: the peculiarity of that passing the time which
belongs to it as the way in which whatever is boring
arises out of Dasein itself


We wish to keep to our path, however, and thus precisely to illuminate for the first time, through our ever-deepening interpretation of boredom, the temporality of Dasein and thereby Dasein itself in its ground.

The present interpretation has been made possible via a comparison and contrasting of two forms of boredom, namely becoming bored by . . . and being bored with .... We described being bored with ... as the more profound of the two. We also arrived at a transformed version of the two structural moments of being left empty and being held in limbo.

On the basis of the interpretation we have given of being bored with ... we can now first understand correctly the peculiarity of that passing the time which belongs to and is associated with this boredom. We said that our passing the time in being bored with ... does not have the halting and uneasy character of the first form, but is identical with our entire participation in the evening, and is accordingly peculiarly inconspicuous. Our passing the time as such struggles against boredom. This boredom, however, spreads out beyond what


Martin Heidegger (GA 29/30) The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics

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