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thought temporally as the way in which Dasein is futurally open for the presencing of beings that have already affected it and that bear a certain significance (a worldly signification). When Dasein understands this future openness in an originary manner, that is, not merely in terms of possibilities of beings, but from out of the futural event of presencing itself, it stands in the Augenblick and lets beings be present in their worldly signification, thus first letting world properly be.

The held ecstasis of the Augenblick is thus fundamentally different from the way in which we are held, for example, in various degrees of boredom—a phenomenon that Heidegger would investigate in 1929/30 in terms of its intrinsic temporality.34 In boredom, we are indeed held, yet in a strangely indeterminate manner, in a way that leaves us empty in our very being. Things themselves no longer fill us, no longer absorb us; we feel empty, unfulfilled, indifferent. Indeed, as Heidegger describes it, the experience of profound boredom, of being bored with beings as a whole, is a telling refusal on the part of beings themselves that calls us back to our proper vocation of "being there," toward the Augenblick in which we may experience the world as world—experience the fact that things call for us in their very being, that they need us to let them be. The temporality of boredom is thus also fundamentally different from, and yet an intimate counterpart of the temporality of curiosity, which Heidegger describes as "the most extreme counterphenomenon to the Augenblick" (SZ, 347). For curiosity is characterized by a nontarrying, by mere dispersion and distraction, by a restlessness and inability to dwell with whatever is there in any given situation:


Curiosity is constituted by an unheld making-present which, merely making [things] present, thereby continually seeks to run away from the attending within which it is nevertheless "held" in the manner of being unheld. The present "springs forth" from its correlative attending, and does so in the emphatic sense of running away. The making-present that pertains to curiosity, in its "springing forth," is, however, so little given over to its "matter" that in attaining its vision it is also already looking away toward what comes next ...."Springing forth" is an ecstatic modification of attending such that the latter springs after making-present. (SZ, 347)


Curiosity, the desire for the new, continually seeks to make present the next newest thing, and is thus unable to dwell with what is present at any given moment. It is unable to let even possibilities for being concerned with


34 See GA 29/30, part 1.


The Glance of the Eye by William McNeill