135

§30 [203-204]

not for us as us, but for one. Name, standing, vocation, role, age and fate as mine and yours disappear. To put it more clearly, precisely this 'it is boring for one' makes all these things disappear. What remains? A universal ego in general? Not by any means. For this 'it is boring for one', this boredom, does not comprise some abstraction or generalization in which a universal concept 'I in general' would be thought. Rather it is boring. This is what is decisive: that here we become an undifferentiated no one. The question is: what is happening here, what is happening in this 'it is boring for one'?

If, however, in accordance with our earlier procedure, we look for an example, then we see that there is none to be found. Yet not because this boredom does not happen, but because when it happens it is not at all relative to a particular situation or particular occasion and the like, as in the first and second forms of boredom. The fact that it is boring for one can occur out of the blue, and precisely whenever we do not expect it at all; certainly there can also be situations in which this fundamental attunement irrupts, situations which are personally quite different with respect to personal experience, occasion, and fate. To cite one possible, but entirely non-binding occasion which has perhaps already been encountered by one or other of us, without our having explicitly noticed the emergence of this boredom and without our explicitly being annoyed of our own accord: 'it is boring for one' to walk through the streets of a large city on a Sunday afternoon.

Evidently this profound boredom, if we follow our methodological principle, must in turn be temporalized in terms of passing the time, as something against which our passing the time can turn. Yet already in the more profound form of boredom, in being bored with, we met a relationship between passing the time and boredom in which this passing the time is limited to an evasion in the face of ... , and in which struggling against ... is given up. In the second form, boredom is accordingly that in the face of which we take evasive action. Now, however, in this 'it is boring for one', we no longer even attain this evasion in the face of boredom. Passing the time is missing in this boredom. Yet in what sense is it missing? What does this missing mean here? Missing in the sense that it simply does not happen, that we forget it, as it were, that we do not think of bringing it to bear against the emergent boredom? None of these. If no passing the time emerges here with respect to this boredom, then this must tie in with the character of this boredom. The absence of passing the time must be determined in part by boredom itself. Passing the time is missing, and yet we may very well think of it, but in such a way that we have already understood that all passing the time is powerless against this boredom, against this 'it is boring for one'. We understand this from out of the boredom itself. In this 'it is boring for one' lies the fact that this boredom wishes to tell us something, and indeed not something arbitrary or contingent. This attunement to which we give expression in 'it is boring for one' has already transformed


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

Page generated by FundaSteller.EXE