Dasein's Community: Being and Time as Political Theory

Blattner's recent commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time attempts to understand the role of Heidegger's concept of das Man (interpreted by him as “the Anyone”) to the understanding of the sociological aspects of Heidegger's phenomenology. What Blattner finds, to no surprise, is that we cannot interpret das Man as a concretely constituted social community but as a distinctly anonymous group of roles:

Blattner hits upon a central concern for political theorists regarding Heidegger's Being and Time. That is, in a work that concentrates on the fundamental structures of human existence, to what degree can we call the “with-world” a collectivity in the political sense? This discussion organizes fundamental debates over Heidegger's political philosophy. Most political theorists tend to align Heidegger with the communitarian camp (Young, Reference Young1997; Thiele, Reference Thiele1997, Reference Thiele1995; Dostal, Reference Dostal1992; Sluga, Reference Sluga1993) while a select few undermine the communitarian reading with disruptive agonic politics (Smith, Reference Smith1996)Footnote ² or a retread to contemporary liberal theories of the self (Salem-Wiseman, Reference Salem-Wiseman2003).

Communitarian readings of Heidegger specialize in liquefying the fundamental ontology of Being and Time and moulding it into an understanding of Heidegger's concrete political alignments with National Socialism (Sluga, Reference Sluga1993; Dostal, Reference Dostal1992). These readings fail to take account for the way in which Dasein, while always already in the world, is not constituted ideologically, but practically through its roles. Even those, such as Dallmayr, which attempt to avoid the vilification of Heidegger's “personal” politics rely on a deconstructive reading of Being and Time that contends that Heidegger's Dasein refers not to us humans but to existence in the project of understanding being (Dallmayr, Reference Dallmayr1984: 534–36). With this move, Dallmayr's communitarian reading of Heidegger posits that Dasein itself transcends subjectivity and intersubjectivity, instead treading the new ground of “being-in-the-world” that refuses to take a stance on the subject/object divide. This move is untenable for several reasons, the most important of which is that Heidegger's Dasein, in its appropriation of mood, takes a reflective stance toward existence that cannot be accomplished through a collectivity of commitments (which, as we wallow in postmodernity, seems increasingly improbable) but by the human being for the human being. We can see evidence of this in the fact that Heidegger devotes attention in Being and Time to the impossibility of “dying-with,” which cements non-being as a thoroughly individual possibility—one's “ownmost possibility,” in fact (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Edward Robinson and Edward Robinson1962: 237–41).

In response, Salem-Wiseman's important essay does much to disrupt Heidegger's reception as a communitarian political thinker. While acknowledging that Heidegger's later work could certainly substantiate communitarian claims, Salem-Wiseman reserves Heidegger's Being and Time as a forerunner of liberal theories of the subject (Reference Salem-Wiseman2003: 533–34). Salem-Wiseman relies on Heidegger's refusal to construct a concept of the good (or a plurality of goods) as evidence that his phenomenology cannot align itself with the communitarian political theories of, say, MacIntyre or Sandel: “Heidegger is philosophically much closer to modern liberals who also reject teleology and the consequent priority of the good in political life” (Salem-Wiseman, Reference Salem-Wiseman2003: 539). Heidegger's insistence that Being and Time is not a work of ethics, Salem-Wiseman contends, devastates the neo-Aristotelianism assumed present in the work. By leaving Dasein open to its possibilities (in fact defining openness to possibility as Dasein's freedom) Salem-Wiseman accords an air of liberal legalism to the work.

Salem-Wiseman's work, while important in its deconstruction, fails go give us anything substantial other than a “coincidental” liberalism that is forged by accidental similarities. Salem-Wiseman's constructive argument relies too heavily on what could have been meant by what was never said in Heidegger; in fact, one comes away from the reading with the sense that, at best, Heidegger's “liberal” forerunning is a mixture of Jamesian pluralism and hermeneutic method (545–53). By concentrating on the particularly existential conception of political life, this essay rejects both readings in favour of an analysis of Being and Time that discards the liberal-legal and communitarian-constitutive political world of exchange in favour of an ontic/ontological distinction of self-affirmation through resolute resignation.

This is grasped most clearly through the difficult moods of anxiety and boredom, the two ways in which Heidegger's Dasein can suspend itself amid the socio-political world of modernity. Two basic rejoinders can be made regarding Heidegger's political potential: Dasein can do nothing of existential consequence while absorbed in the world of others and the mood of profound boredom cancels “care,” the early Heidegger's most routinely “political” concept. Even when Dasein takes its turn toward a resigned freedom through anxiety, it is not the liberal concept of self-liberty that occupies western thought. With this in mind, I turn to Heidegger's conception of moods, particularly the two of most important to us in this study.

Being-in-the-Mood: Anxiety, Boredom, and Politics

Heidegger's fundamental ontology advances Husserl's phenomenological project through a move to understand the way in which the human being, Dasein, actually is in order to appropriate the possibility of understanding its Being. At the forefront of Dasein's being is the notion that it is always in some mood. Heidegger notes that moods, from the circumspective “fear” to the reflective “anxiety” inform Dasein's encounters with equipment in the world and the nothingness of its future as a being. Much can be made of Heidegger's appropriation of moods—or, as interpreted by Heidegger's translators, “attunements,” to the understanding of political life. One particular attunement reveals itself as the “fundamental” mood of Dasein: anxiety. In Being and Time, Heidegger refers to anxiety as the fundamental attunement of Dasein (Reference Heidegger, Edward Robinson and Edward Robinson1962: 229, 310). Anxiety, as a state-of-mind, is Dasein's way of authentically taking a resolute stance toward “the ‘nothing’ of the possible impossibility of its existence” (310). Anxiety is the mood in which Dasein takes a stance toward its own death. In this sense, anxiety is an ontological emancipation from the ideologies of finitude's forgetting of itself.Footnote ³

We can better understand the difficulties of appropriating our “Being” in late modernity from a companion analysis of another of Heidegger's moods: boredom (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Nicholas Walker and Nicholas Walker1995; Thiele, Reference Thiele1997). Other than anxiety, boredom is the only attunement which Heidegger considered fundamental to understanding Dasein's Being (Reference Heidegger, Nicholas Walker and Nicholas Walker1995: 79). While anxiety promises liberation by placing Dasein face to face with the “possibility of the impossibility,” boredom is a mood that is brought on by Dasein's search to find meaning for itself amidst the suffocating directive of “world trade, technology, and the economy” (Reference Heidegger, Nicholas Walker and Nicholas Walker1995: 77). In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger turns his focus to the concept of boredom as an “ontological hole” at the bottom of being. As a result of this interesting turn in Heidegger's philosophical mood, this section will perform three tasks: 1) an examination of attunement as fundamental to understanding being; 2) an brief explication of anxiety and boredom in Heidegger's thought; and 3) an analysis of the “nothingness” of anxiety and the “emptiness” of boredom as exemplary philosophical tools of late modernity.

The Phenomenology of the State-of-Mind: Heidegger on Moods

Heidegger confronts Dasein's being from the standpoint of moods. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, Heidegger notes that moods are not something trivial to understanding Dasein; in fact, they are the only way in which we can confront being: “Attunement belongs to the being of man” (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Nicholas Walker and Nicholas Walker1995: 63). Moods can be awakened in Dasein, which suggests that they are always there, even when they are not “present.” The mood of joy, for instance, is not created anew each time I feel a sensation in my body of warmth or comfort. Indeed, the mood is always present in the human being—it is merely sleeping when we are not currently “in” it (Reference Heidegger, Nicholas Walker and Nicholas Walker1995: 66). Heidegger suggests that moods co-constitute Dasein's very being—they tell us, for instance, “where Dasein is” when Dasein confronts its environment or its possibility (Reference Heidegger, Nicholas Walker and Nicholas Walker1995: 63). Further, attunement discloses itself as a fundamental mode of Dasein's sociality: “Attunement is not some being that appears in the soul as an experience, but the way of our being there with one another” (Reference Heidegger, Nicholas Walker and Nicholas Walker1995: 66).

Since attunement is part of Dasein's being and relates Dasein to environment and the social world, Heidegger notes that Dasein can never escape attunement altogether; in fact, only a change in attunement is possible (Reference Heidegger, Nicholas Walker and Nicholas Walker1995: 68). Even the seeming lack of attunement, “indifference,” appears to Heidegger to carry some semblance of Dasein's other moods—most importantly, that indifference acts as a forerunner of the interpretation of experience. Being-attuned is Dasein's way of apprehending the world and its place within the world: “having a mood brings Dasein face to face with its thrownness in such a manner that this thrownness is not known as such but disclosed … in ‘how one is'” (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Edward Robinson and Edward Robinson1962: 389). Moods always relate themselves to the past, such that they are primarily “bringing one back” to something (Reference Heidegger, Edward Robinson and Edward Robinson1962: 390). The inauthentic moods (fear, hope) provide an escape from Dasein's “ownmost possibility” of its being-towards-death; the authentic moods (anxiety, guilt) provide Dasein with a state of mind in which it can confront the possibility of the impossible—its own death—with resoluteness.

How can we differ between the inauthentic and authentic moods? What makes a mood authentic, and what type of claim is Heidegger making with this distinction? Heidegger relies on a variant on the concept of “alienation,” suggesting that moods differ by the degree to which they engage the human being's “homelessness” in the world. Through the discussion of moods, we find evidence of Heidegger's insistence on Dasein as “fallen away” from itself. Steiner notes, “This bold antinomy, this view of the ‘positivity’ of alienation, sets Martin Heidegger's thought sharply apart from that of the two other great models of man's fall in modern western culture: the Marxist and the therapeutic… ‘Fallenness’ is the inevitable quality which characterizes an individual's involvement with others and with the phenomenal world. There can be no cure from being” (Reference Steiner1989: 98).

Inauthenticity is a primary component of Dasein's being-in-the-world. Through its dealings with others Dasein becomes alienated from itself and forms identifications with other human beings and with the world of phenomena. How does this inauthenticity reveal itself in moods? Take, for instance, the mood of fear. Fear induces a backing-away of Dasein from a “factical potentiality-for-Being” of its own (Reference Heidegger, Edward Robinson and Edward Robinson1962: 392). With its backing-away from its ownmost potentiality, Dasein's fearfulness is, for the most part, a forgetting: “in the face of this potentiality one backs away in bewilderment, and this kind of forgetting oneself is what constitutes the existential-temporal meaning of fear” (Reference Heidegger, Edward Robinson and Edward Robinson1962: 392). Fear is inauthentic because it backs away from itself and it does not take hold of any definite possibility. The same can be said for hope, which clamours for an object in the face of Dasein's ownmost possibility of its death. The space for distinction between Dasein's authenticity and inauthenticity, revealed through mood, is the way in which Dasein confronts its own death: with resolute clarity (anxiety) or escapism (fear, hope).

Heidegger's moods open Dasein to confront its own being with a circumspective or reflective gaze from its past and toward its future. The temporality of moods suggests that Dasein enters into a mood looking back at “what has been”; in other words, Dasein is always already incorporating its past into the analysis of its futurity. The distinction between authentic and inauthentic moods provides us with some idea how Dasein should appropriate its states of mind in pursuit of an understanding of being. Anxiety, as the authentic liberation of Dasein from its inauthenticity and toward its resoluteness, is a fundamental mood, close to Dasein's essence. Can there be any other mood besides anxiety which is fundamental to Dasein? If so, what can this mood provide Dasein without attaching itself to an object? And what do these moods mean for modern “community”? Simply put, anxiety and boredom uncover the way in which Dasein overcomes the world of politics ontologically; that is, they reveal that fundamental moods reveal the world of politics as alive, but that politics, as an ontic exercise, involves itself in the covering up of Dasein's ownmost possibility. Anxiety and profound boredom clear the path for the self-appropriation of existence, which is constituted through the affirmation of being-unto-death in the face of (and in direct response to) placid, inauthentic affirmations that being is good.

Bored with Boredom? Anxious for the End? On the Relation of Two Fundamental Attunements

How does Dasein rise to anxiety? We are best served through a concentration on Heidegger's employment of the term “uncanny” (unheimlich) as an explanation. As mentioned above, Heidegger's anxiety reveals what Steiner calls the “positivity of alienation” in hopes of uncovering the authenticity behind existential reflection. In contrast to fallenness, Dasein’s authentic being-in-the-world, exposed through anxiety, arises out of a feeling of the “uncanny”: “As we have said earlier, a state of mind makes manifest ‘how one is.’ In anxiety one feels ‘uncanny.’ Here the particular indefiniteness of that which Dasein finds itself alongside in anxiety, comes proximally to the expression: the ‘nothing and nowhere.’ But here ‘uncanniness' also means ‘not-being-at-home’” (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Edward Robinson and Edward Robinson1962: 233).

Through uncanniness, best realized as “being a stranger in the world,” Dasein feels its anxiety toward the possible impossibility of its Existence. To exist within a world in which Dasein does not feel as if it belongs brings about the feeling of anxiety, which itself is directed toward the Nothing of its ownmost possibility. Despite the “uncanniness” of its own existence, Dasein within the grasp of anxiety has the opportunity to realize “the true being of the self is fundamentally unheimlich” (Nishitani, Reference Nishitani1990: 166). Because anxiety is a mood of authentic being, it does not hide this fact from Dasein but, rather, forces Dasein to face the reality of its own nothingness.

Anxiety reveals itself as the fundamental attunement of Dasein's authentic stand toward its own existence. As Nishitani notes, “Anxiety does not mean a rational grasp of nihility. It means that we encounter nihility in the experience of having beings-as-a-whole gradually withdraw and slide away from us, assuming a strangely alienating aspect…. The attack of nihility does not signify the negating of beings: negating means power, whereas anxiety means a complete powerlessness in relation to beings” (Reference Nishitani1990: 167). Anxiety as a liberatory mechanism of Dasein does not reveal itself as any sort of power; instead, anxiety is best realized as resolute resignation to the possibility of the impossibility of Existence. Anxiety is the mood of the Nothing, and the actions Dasein takes out of its anxious state (which are the way in which Dasein authentically deals in its temporality) reveal the necessity of resignation to death, without necessarily ceding responsibility for life. In one of the great paradoxes of Being and Time, anxiety forces Dasein to take responsibility for its life, even though it is not in control of it.

In contrast to the analysis of anxiety, Heidegger's other fundamental attunement, boredom, reveals a much more insolent nature. While Heidegger could separate fear and anxiety through the utilization of ontic/ontological distinction and the authenticity/inauthenticity divide, boredom is a much more troubling mood. For starters, boredom can relate itself to nothing in particular or can be directed toward an object (becoming bored with a television program, for instance). Thus, it reveals both ontic and ontological dimensions. Secondly, although anxiety is the much more well-known mood of Dasein, boredom appears to be the more prevalent; in fact, as one Heidegger scholar notes, boredom is the “basic mood of our age” (Thiele, Reference Thiele1997: 490). Indeed, in Heidegger's words, boredom is “an insidious creature which maintains its monstrous essence in our Dasein” (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Nicholas Walker and Nicholas Walker1995: 91).

According to Thiele, boredom is the fundamental attunement of Dasein in postmodernity. Profound boredom (that is, being-bored-with, which lacks an object) exposes the holes in modern life by a refusal to be enticed ontologically by being. Since one encounters a world in which it is not compelled to choose authentically, Dasein finds itself “coping” with objects and other human beings in a world that is of no interest to it. Heidegger's basic question in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics is: precisely what kind of meaning can be found for Dasein amidst world trade, technology, and increasingly prescient economic structures? When Dasein is “carried along” by these dominating forces, exactly where can it turn to achieve meaning for itself authentically? Perhaps one would think that the increasing mechanization of human life would be a cause for great care to, in Weinstein's words, “defend the flesh against the abuses of culture” (Weinstein, Reference Weinstein1995: 7). Instead, what Heidegger finds, is that meaning all but vanishes before the “emptiness” of Dasein's choices within-the-world. Heidegger's employment of boredom as the fundamental attunement of post-industrial society suggests that the triviality of choice negates the presence of actual, authentic life-choice. This is the ground on which boredom rests, as “a silent fog in the abyss of Dasein” (Reference Heidegger, Nicholas Walker and Nicholas Walker1995: 78).

Boredom penetrates Dasein through two separate paths. Dasein can either become bored with something (such as a technological device, friend, or situation) or can be bored with (a case in which there is no object to call “boring” but only the emptiness of Dasein's choices). In the first form of boredom, we find that this attunement is tied closely (as with anxiety) to Dasein's experience of temporality. Boredom, simply put, is one way in which time temporalizes. When Dasein finds itself in a bored state of mind, this simply suggests that “time becomes long for us” (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Nicholas Walker and Nicholas Walker1995: 80). When we are in the state of becoming bored with something, we are becoming bored because the object, person, or situation no longer passes the time. In this case, Dasein simply looks for something else that will pass the time—or in other words, reverse the speed of temporality in a particular case. When Dasein is bored with an object, its relation to the object is one of “holding-in-limbo” of time with the object itself “leaving us empty” (Reference Heidegger, Nicholas Walker and Nicholas Walker1995: 87). Heidegger gives the example of Dasein waiting for a train in a train station for three hours. In this case, Dasein is held in limbo by time and the space (the train station) leaves Dasein empty. This combination of being held in limbo and leaving-empty simply awakens the dormant feeling of boredom always already present in Dasein's essence.

In the first instance, Dasein confronts its boredom with something that will speed up time. Usually, this is accomplished through occupation (in this case, perhaps through a crossword puzzle, a leisurely walk, or conversation with a stranger). However, this response can only temporarily speed the temporality of time itself and cannot provide Dasein with an authentic response to the “leaving-empty” of the environing world. In these cases, Dasein has to confront the slowness of time, attempting in any way possible to speed time up in order to escape the grasp of boredom; it does not necessarily matter how long one is in the train station, only that the time cannot be filled by anything the station has to offer to Dasein: “The length of time plays no role, not because time is too long, i.e., not because the measurable stretch of time which we objectively plot on our watch is too great—not because the progress of time is slow, but because it is too slow. We fight against the progress of time which is slowing down and is too slow for us, and which in boredom holds us in limbo” (Reference Heidegger, Nicholas Walker and Nicholas Walker1995: 97).

The slowness of time Dasein feels while waiting prompts the feeling of boredom, which becomes a dark cloud over Dasein's experience within the particular time and space. Heidegger's phenomenology of boredom highlights a fundamental characteristic of Dasein's being-in-the-world: the incessant occupation with others, Dasein's fallenness to das Man, is an originary reason for and response to the challenge of boredom. Dasein's everydayness is full of playing the game of averting boredom that inevitably arises. And, as Dasein's existence becomes more mechanized, the opportunities for escaping boredom (through novelty) become more routine and, as a result, less compelling. This is Heidegger's exposition of contemporary community; while we find ourselves occupied with others, a “silent fog” of boredom prevails over political life.

Behind either conception of boredom is the realization of Dasein's emptiness with relation to the social world and its own possibility. Chronic boredom, which Heidegger calls “profound” boredom, lacks a fundamental object in the way that “becoming bored by” something relates itself to an article. In profound boredom, objects are not what is boring; indeed, “they are coincidentally that with which we ourselves are bored” (Reference Heidegger, Nicholas Walker and Nicholas Walker1995: 113). In profound boredom, Heidegger finds that Dasein takes a casualness toward its own being, such that it does not particularly care what it does in a given situation, or how it passes the time (Reference Heidegger, Nicholas Walker and Nicholas Walker1995: 117). For instance, if one attends a party on a Saturday evening, and “goes through the motions” during the party, one still leaves feeling somewhat empty. But it was not the company, the hors d'oeuvres, or the music that bored Dasein; instead, Dasein is bored with itself and as a result takes a casual stance towards its commitments and possibilities. This is the state at which boredom becomes profound—when Dasein feels a persistent emptiness without an object. In such cases, according to Heidegger, “there arises a slipping away, away from ourselves toward whatever is happening” (Reference Heidegger, Nicholas Walker and Nicholas Walker1995: 118). At this point we realize something very important: although boredom is a fundamental attunement of Dasein, it does not present an authentic response to Dasein's being-towards-death; in fact, it appears to provide precisely the opposite function as anxiety. Profound boredom is a slipping away of Dasein from itself—not a fallenness, which is Dasein's originary position, but a recession from the slowness of time toward complete resignation.

Profound boredom, like the ethical-religious despair of Kierkegaard, does not relate to objects at all but to the presentation of being to the self. The profound boredom forsakes an attachment to the object in favour of an ontological determination concerning the worthiness of the world (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Nicholas Walker and Nicholas Walker1995: 116–20). Heidegger's analysis of profound boredom centres on the ontological indication of the mood suggested by the inability of objects to provide Dasein with any substantive quality: “Boredom becomes more and more concentrated on us, on our situation as such, whereby the individual details of the situation are of no consequence; they are only coincidentally that which we ourselves are bored, they are not that which bores us” (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Nicholas Walker and Nicholas Walker1995: 113). In the case of profound boredom, the presence or absence of a particular object is of no consequence; profound boredom is Dasein's judgment concerning the world directed back toward Dasein itself. The way in which the world offers nothing, and Dasein sees emptiness, in an ontological sense, are part of the way in which existence becomes precluded by the numbing effects of mass technology and mass society (Tuttle, Reference Tuttle1996).

For Heidegger, the two forms of boredom provide insight into the way in which time temporalizes and the response Dasein sustains to this phenomenon. Once Dasein finds itself in complex relations, fully ensconced in the force of economy, trade, and mechanization of the mind and body, the floodgates open for the awakening of a profound boredom. This boredom, which arises from Dasein's emptiness toward its own possibility, cements Dasein within space and time, providing no liberation or escape. When Dasein finds itself in the clutches of profound boredom, it resigns itself to its fate as unheimlich, without any type of resolution or redemption. Boredom is the fundamental attunement of Dasein in contemporary life—an empty mood for a period devoid of meaning.

Emptiness and Nothingness: Toward a Dialogue

Anxiety, through a resignation toward nothingness, is the way in which Dasein frees itself, authentically, from ontic flights into unreality or object-centred fear toward its own being. In this sense, anxiety is liberation for Dasein: “anxiety liberates him from possibilities which ‘count for nothing,’ and lets him become free for those which are authentic” (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Edward Robinson and Edward Robinson1962: 395). Anxiety, although always already grounded in the past, springs from the “resoluteness of the future” and becomes the standpoint from which the world is engaged. As a step in Dasein's individualization, anxiety provides a response to nothingness as, to pose another paradox, resolute resignation in the face of nothingness—an acceptance of Dasein's fate without a resignation to abandon possibility. In this sense, the nothingness confronted by an anxious Dasein is not necessarily negative—indeed, it is Dasein's way back to himself.

We can contrast the positivity of nothingness with the negativity of emptiness in Heidegger's analysis of boredom. While anxiety is a resolute resignation to the nothingness of its ownmost possibility, boredom is always already “stuck” in the emptiness of life-choice for the postmodern Dasein. Unlike anxiety, boredom is not a mood which provides an escape from some form of inauthenticity. Its many modes (becoming bored by, being bored with, and so forth) provide circles which are not hermeneutic—they cannot be traversed and they can only scarcely be understood. To feel the bite of emptiness is, in no way, redemptive for Dasein. Boredom, particularly profound boredom, demonstrates the power of emptiness over the social world of Dasein. There is no line toward return—no exit from the emptiness of a post-industrial existence. As human life increases in its mechanical complexity, Dasein becomes further and further removed from its concern with itself and its world. Profound boredom, experienced as living the feeling of emptiness, is a paralyzing force that afflicts Dasein at all corners. There is no redemption, no light at the end of the tunnel—only momentary reprieve made laconic through postmodernity's “routinization of novelty” (Thiele, Reference Thiele1997).

Nothingness and emptiness are the two ways in which Dasein reaches from its past toward its future as possibilities. Nothingness is the nothingness of the past, becoming the nothingness of the future; emptiness, however, is the emptiness of the past stuck in the present, and projected onto the future. Through the analysis of Heidegger's philosophy of moods, we have been able to trace the way in which attunement affects Dasein. Further, we have been able to isolate two fundamental moods—anxiety and boredom—as the best examples of the way in which Dasein “is.” Finally, we have seen how the nothingness of anxiety and the emptiness of boredom confront each other in Dasein's temporality. If these two attunements are indeed the fundamental ways in which Dasein is, we can see them working against each other within ourselves. Boredom is, more than anything, the resignation from the possibility of resoluteness; in other words, boredom deadens the possibility of anxiety. Anxiety, as liberation from irrelevant possibilities, seeks to awaken itself from the grip of postmodernity by drawing Dasein back toward its ownmost possibility, which is not dependent on a particular epoch. Emptiness may be our particular cultural condition, but anxiety reveals itself as Dasein's ownmost mood of freedom regardless of the level of mechanization present in everyday life.

In Being and Time, Heidegger's Dasein becomes a being without a ground in the present—a being with the opportunity of experiencing its existential absence through anticipatory resoluteness (anxiety) or a slipping-away toward emptiness (boredom). Heidegger's moods devalorize presence in favour of a politics of lack; Dasein becomes engaged with projecting its possibility from the ashes of the past to the uncertainty of its future, which it must meet head on, despite the negation of the possibility of transcending its limit. The nothingness which becomes the payoff of Dasein's investigation into its own being, hanging on through the thread of “care,” becomes tenuous when related to the possible emptiness of profound boredom which, as an ontological attunement, also releases Dasein into its ownmost possibility within advanced technological society. Dasein's ecstatic time, which relies on anxiety as the strand of continuity from the past through the projected future, could conceptually crumble with the advance of profound boredom.

The Ontic/Ontological Distinction: Reflection and the Erasing of the Political

What we find, through the analysis of moods and the display of nothingness as the liberation of Dasein, as well as emptiness as a threat, is that the distinction between authentic and inauthentic moods, that is, the ontological/ontic distinction, is the backbone of Heidegger's phenomenology. Everything which makes Dasein the reticent being-in-the-world transforms through the establishment of a mood that resigns Dasein to its fate without giving in. All of this takes place as Dasein moves from one mood to another. While Dasein is always already involved in its dealings with the world, it is at the point of transcendence, when Dasein's circumstances become its opportunities, that the human being reaches the actuality of its being—that is, through the cognizance of its finitude. Behind Dasein's moods is nothing more than the ontic/ontological divide, which, on its own, is solely based on whether the mood contains an object.

The absence of an object informs us that through mood Dasein moves outside the ontic world and toward a sphere that is its own. Profound (ontological) boredom, for example, cancels “care,” Heidegger's structural realization of being-in-the-world (and, perhaps, the last gasp of a political possibility within Being and Time). When Dasein becomes profoundly bored, it has no recourse to the care structure that makes up its ontological grounding. Heidegger's appropriation of guilt as the mobilization of a conscience of care recedes under the terrifying coldness of a human being who is profoundly bored with itself, with its life, and with its own experience of boredom. The resolute resignation of anxiety, which is so important to Heidegger's “absent heroism” of Being and Time, loses its ground under boredom: “Anticipatory resoluteness is not a way of escape, fabricated for the ‘overcoming’ of death; it is rather that understanding which follows the call of conscience and which frees for death the power over Dasein's existence and of basically dispersing all fugitive self-concealments” (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger, Edward Robinson and Edward Robinson1962: 310; Zimmerman, Reference Zimmerman1986: 139). Heidegger's insistence on the use of the call of conscience as the backbone of care appears to be an indispensable portion of his heroic turn toward allowing finitude to wash over one's self. While anxiety remains the way in which Dasein experiences authenticity through its own death, profound boredom, as the most powerful counter-mood, replaces the positivity of nothingness with the detachment of emptiness, thereby cancelling the care-structure and political power. This is the most important move in Dasein's analysis of profound boredom; it is indeed the one mood in which Dasein's ontological ground forfeits itself to the discontent of its own being.

Anxiety's absent heroism and boredom's cancelling of care elucidate the way in which Heideggerian authenticity bases itself on the absence of an object. The fact that boredom and anxiety are fundamental to Dasein's being because they lack an object suggests much about the possibility of a postmodern political community within Heidegger's ontology. The vacuous community Dasein engages in its “dealings” with the world must be overcome in order to appropriate being. The human being's average everyday involvement, through the vehicle of das Man, is little more than a negation of the importance of “being-with” as a device of existential freedom. Dasein must release itself from its community to achieve a modicum of authenticity. As long as Dasein's being concerns itself with beings, it cannot become the political actor it needs in order to deal effectively with its finite existence. Even profound boredom, an obstructive mood, must be appropriated through the individualization of Dasein, which occurs through the disintegration of (and detachment from) collective life.

The ontic/ontological distinction highlights one component of Heidegger's phenomenology often overlooked: the reliance on radical separation of Dasein from its world as the consequence of authenticity. As mentioned above, many efforts have been made within political theory to demonstrate the ability of Heidegger to transform either the communitarian ideals of social justice or the liberal conception of the self. Instead, what we see through this analysis of Heidegger's phenomenology is the transformation of community through the reflective turn, which serves to detach Dasein from the traditional trappings of collective existence. With no common ideologies, the call to community (which is, in its own way, a call to conscience) falls on deaf ears. All collective life, in which Dasein is either bored or becoming bored, is done in the realm of the inauthentic. Though Dasein becomes itself in a world and with others, it is not through others that Dasein realizes itself. In fact, I take quite the opposite to be the case.

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2007 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago, Illinois. The author wishes to thank Michael A. Weinstein, Daniel W. Smith, and Thierno Thiam for help and constructive criticism throughout.