Heidegger's profound boredom

and addiction

Paul Boshears

the European Graduate School (CH)

 The purpose of this talk

Heidegger's discussion and development of

profound boredom helps us to intimate an
orientation towards ourselves in an
expanded sense such that who we are is
mutually implicated and consummated in
our relationships to the world as itself.
 Befindlichkeit ----> Dasein
 Es st einem lanweilig (lit. “It is boring for one”) -
a state of profound boredom
 The central problematic in modern society is the
loss of identity in our intoxication to developing
technologies
 The central task for humanity is to return to the
world as not only that mysterious medium
through which we live but also the only manner
in which we might express our freedom
 Addiction and Modernity
A strict medical model of addiction subsumes
personal agency to a pathological chemical
interaction – We are alienated from ourselves in
narcosis.
AA-style (12-step) interventions demonstrate the
fundamentally social nature of recovery:
recovery
individuals that not only change their behavior
but also their social context are more likely to
maintain cessation from substances of abuse.
 The tyranny of efficiency
Nature. 11 December, 2008 .
Vol. 456.

Being in the modern era is concealed by

the growing purveyance of three attitudes:

1) Calculation – the principle of organization

2) Acceleration – “not-being-able-to-bear the stillness of

hidden growth”

3) Massiveness – the rapidly stacking-up of the calculable

 Befindlichkeit?
Wie befinden Sie sich? – “how do you find yourself
(today)?”

Our moods reveal to us our how we find ourselves,

our “findedness”
findedness

Two moments in this theory of moods:

1) understanding (verstehen)
2) attunement (befindlichkeit)
 Time
Our attempts to kill time (so as to drive away
boredom) are actually a driving-on of time.
Any attempt to kill time obscures our being
(Dasein), which is always a being-in time.

Three forms of boredom:

1) becoming bored by something
2) being bored with something
3) profound boredom – an indifference from outside
 World's telling refusal
Profound boredom,
“brings the self in all its nakedness to itself as the
self that is there and has taken over the being
there of its Da-sein. For what purpose? To be
that Dasein.”
This is a calling, then, to consummate the
emptiness of our being within our relation to all
of Being (nature, the universe, etc.)
A call to responsiveness, rather than responsibility.
 Assumptions about Selfhood
• “Who I am”
am is fundamentally a social event, it is not a
substance or kernel that contains my essence.
• This performative self (Butler, 2005) is based upon and
adjusted within my social and physical environments.
• My uniqueness is determined by my performance of my
roles within these environments; “who I am” develops within
a context.
 Notions of Selfhood¹

A B

¹ Kasulis, Thomas P. 2002. Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural

Difference. Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press.
 Notions of Selfhood

B
I C
H A D
G E
F This is the essential purpose of the prison –
to disallow relationships between society
(Kasulis 2002) and the prisoner
 Notions of Selfhood

A R B
Spouse, Parent, Friend, Spouse, Child, Friend,
etc. etc.

(Kasulis 2002)
 Notions of Selfhood

A B

(Kasulis 2002)
 Notions of Selfhood

E
B F
A
C G
D

(Kasulis 2002)