Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
“mattering to” rests on an attunement, a mood-quality which the being-in-
the-world always has (1986: 134ff., 1983: 99ff.). Every activity is attuned in
a way that brings out its signifi cance. Meaningfulness in all forms thus has a
tune to it. The different moods in question need not be powerful or directly
paid attention to, but they are
there
as the constitutive ground of our being
placed in the meaning pattern of the world. We do indeed not choose our
moods; they come to us and cannot easily be changed.
Anxiety and boredom
Let us now come back to anxiety and boredom. These are quite peculiar
moods (or
Stimmungen
as the German language has it). It is striking, and for
sure no coincidence, that these two major pathologies of our contemporary
life are the very ones to which Heidegger gives the name
Grundstimmungen
in his phenomenological analysis from the late 1920s (Held 1993). What is
peculiar to anxiety and boredom is that they not only open, but also
block
our possibilities to be in the world in the manner of being with things and
other human beings in a way that makes sense to us. They do this in different
ways though. Anxiety has a paralyzing quality to it, whereas boredom
rather puts us to sleep. In anxiety the world bursts, in boredom it withers.
To Heidegger these disturbing experiences carry important possibilities for
phenomenological analysis itself. In anxiety and boredom it becomes possible
to catch sight of the very
structure
of the world in its meaningfulness, since
it is, so to say, laid bare, as a pure meaning structure in which we can no
longer engage. No particular thing in the world matters any more and thus it
becomes possible, and even necessary, to address the meaning of the being-
in-the-world
as such
. This is the possibility of an
authentic
, philosophically
refl ected life in Heidegger, which in contrast to the public anonymity of the
“they” (
das Man
) faces its own fi nitude and accepts responsibility for its own
choices (1986: 260ff.).
I will return briefl y to Heidegger's analysis of authenticity and inauthenticity
below. His rendering of the relationship between these two different kinds
of understandings, i.e. forms of life, is very complex and insightful, but
it nevertheless, I think, suffers from various phenomenological errors,
which mainly have to do with Heidegger's treatment of intersubjectivity
(Nancy 2003). For the moment, I would like to focus upon two aspects of
Heidegger's anxiety- and boredom-analysis, which I think are fruitful for a
phenomenology of psychiatry: being at home and being in time. Anxiety, in
Being and Time
, and boredom, in
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics
,
are both characterized as
unhomelike
phenomena (1986: 189, 1983: 120).
They make the settling, the being at home in the world, impossible, since the
world resists meaningfulness. The world becomes alien; it is not
my
world
anymore. Heidegger even talks about an eternal home longing (
Sehnsucht
),
which is let loose in boredom. The key idea of authentic understanding is
to develop this unhomelikeness and home longing to a kind of structural
