Third Day: The Two Ecstasies of Extreme Solitude (Heidegger and Levinas)

November 23, 2020

“Ecstasy” is from the original Greek ékstasis, the state of “being beside oneself,” as in the interruption of a familiar state of Dasein, which Heidegger defines as the “inauthentic” (das uneigentliche), since it belongs an anonymous and impersonal “they” (Das Mann). Likewise, for Levinas, the primitive state of Being is pure impersonal consciousness. However, in the conclusion of the section we have been reading, rather than locating the disruption (or the “limit-experience”) of Being in the “nothingness-interval” that occurs in a rare and exceptional state of anxiety, he asks whether individual consciousness and subjectivity themselves might be located as the cause of this disruption. In other words, “We must ask whether consciousness, with its aptitude for sleep, for suspension, for epochē, is not the locus of this nothingness-interval.”

For example, each night consciousness reverts to a pure impersonal consciousness by sleeping; insomnia is precisely the interruption of this state of being when consciousness awakens to the night, and suddenly finds that it is outside and beside itself. For Heidegger, the comparative daylight state is boredom, when Dasein suddenly awakens from its normal and inauthentic state of existence; this implies that the normative state of Dasein is work or activity, and boredom is what happens when Dasein awakens to find itself “out of work.” In addressing the current situation, in the daylight of the pandemic, I can only imagine that everybody (tout le monde) has suddenly awakened to find themselves, at least to some degree, “out of work” and thus prone to long intervals of boredom during the day.

Therefore, even despite Levinas’s earlier objections to the instrumentality of Heidegger’s language to indiscriminately characterize both useful objects and other persons, we need to recognize that our relations to other people most of the time, particularly those we encounter in the course of our work, are precisely determined in terms of their serviceability for our “dealings” with others in the world, employing Heidegger’s term for the actual source of Dasein’s “care for others” (Fürsorge). In the section on “Being with Others” (Mitsein), Heidegger employs a range of definitions of the German usage of the term that span from prenatal care, caring for the elderly and sick, and the administration of social welfare; however, on the other pole, he lists those modes of “deficient care” that range from a simple lack of concern to extreme indifference. In fact, he argues that the greater quantity of our dealings with others in the world, this lack of concern and indifference, is what characterizes “everyday, average Being-with-one-another,” even though, contrary to Levinas’s reading of these modes of deficient care, this does not mean that persons are merely reduced to things in the same factual social arrangement. “Ontologically,” Heidegger argues, “there is an essential distinction between the ‘indifferent’ way in which Things at random occur together and the way in which entities who are with one another do not ‘matter’ to one another.”

In addition to the extreme polarity of Dasein’s “care for others,” there is another mode of what could be called “deficient care” that Heidegger does not choose to address in defining the modes of “everyday, average Being-with-one-another,” even though it is especially present in all of Dasein’s dealings with others in the world of work. For example, in the drive-through at McDonalds, I expect the Dasein on the microphone to be ready-to-hand to take my order, answer promptly and politely, make the correct change, and hand me my “order” immediately upon my arrival at the second window. Likewise, at the restaurant after work, I expect the “waiter” or “server” to be prompt in greeting my small company immediately after we are seated, cheerful and subservient to my demands, patient with my guests’ questions about the menu or instructions about special dietary restrictions, and then to take our order when we are ready and deliver it to the kitchen promptly, return within an expected interval with plates in arm and place them correctly in front of each guest, and finally, ask us if we want a second round of drinks, and desert after dinner is finished, and so on. Depending on how “ready-to-hand” they are, we might even consider giving Dasein an extra tip, or toss a few coins on the table before leaving the establishment if we are in Europe. In any case, this kind of instrumentality constitutes the largest part of all our “dealings” with others during the day. In other words, in the world that is “formed” (gebildet) by work, Dasein plays an assigned role in the Master-Slave dialectic that has become routinized in capitalist societies, and in such a way that playing the role of a Master is regarded as a well-earned entitlement for completing one’s daily assignment as a Slave. For example, even the waiter who clocks out after her shift immediately “orders” a drink from the bartender, and then complains to her colleagues about the bad service. The hedge fund broker who ends a day of successful trading on the floor of the exchange by going to the nightclub on 42nd and paying the prostitute for a blowjob in the rear booth is merely a more “conspicuous” expression of the same Master-Slave relationship that Dasein engages in on a daily basis. Of course, in its inauthentic mode of the “they,” Dasein actually never sees this relationship to others as part of a Master-Slave dialectic, since it has grown callous and “indifferent” to its own carelessness in order to shield itself from its own mastery and its own subjugation.

In the case of boredom, which belongs only to the day and to the time of work, the normal assignments of both things and other people can suddenly be interrupted in a manner that is similar to Heidegger’s earlier description of equipment that has become broken or found to be no longer ready-to-hand. This can take many forms, three of which Heidegger will take up in the analyzing the existential “attunement” (Bestimmung) of the mood of being “bored with” (sich langweilen mit) in the 1929 seminar: becoming bored by something (gelangweiltwerden von etwas), bored with others (gelangweilt von anderen), bored with oneself (sich langweilen). In (the) light of the pandemic, however, I am particularly concerned with how this analysis must now be revised to address the extreme situation of boredom that one experiences habitually or daily in living on a desert island. In other words, what Heidegger describes as the normal feelings of being suspended, held in limbo, feeling empty and disinterested in doing anything whatsoever—especially in becoming bored with others and with oneself—how do these feelings stand with us in the profound boredom that descends like a morning fog to cover every part of our island during the day, and then threatens to last forever and throw us into an abyss?

Turning to Heidegger’s 1929 analysis, first, we should immediately notice that the first two forms of boredom he examines clearly belong to being in the world (In-der-Welt-sein): sitting at some “tasteless and minor” railway station and waiting for the train that will depart in four hours; sitting in some boring cocktail party and gradually becoming bored with others. Of course, neither of these situations can be applied to our experience of boredom these days. First, if we update the “tasteless and minor” railway station to the modern airport, especially when the plane is no longer sitting on the taxiway ready for departure and most of flights are canceled, we are no longer simply talking about a “minor delay.” (Even the executive lounge is closed and boarded up with plywood, and most of the bars and restaurants are shuttered and dark, so Dasein can’t go to the bar in order to kill some time between flights.) Second, because sitting in a large group after dinner and smoking cigars in order to pass the time with some pleasant and meaningless conversation is these days prohibited according to the social distancing guidelines laid down by the CDC, it is difficult to become “bored with others” these days. In fact, today these social experiences of boredom appear more like luxuries of a now bygone world, and even the dreariest cocktail parties now seem like pleasure boats leaving the harbor at dusk for the next port of call with the band playing the final verse of “Auld Lang Syne.”

To save some time in our analysis, let’s just bypass these first two modes of boredom as no longer pertaining to our contemporary extramundane existence, and turn instead to focus exclusively on the third form of “profound boredom” (die tiefe Langeweile). In the case of the third form of “profound boredom,” there is something present in Heidegger’s analysis that might be useful in approaching the experience of boredom that has become familiar and a daily occurrence today—that is, in (the) light of the pandemic. I would hazard that it is an experience that everybody (tout le monde) who lives on a desert island has become familiar with, but this familiarity only intensifies the feelings of “being left empty” and “placed in limbo” that are associated with the common and worldly moods of boredom and being-bored. This intensification of mood occurs when, as Heidegger describes it, “beings have become indifferent as a whole and we ourselves as these people are not excepted. We no longer stand as subjects and suchlike opposite these beings and excluded from them but find ourselves in the midst of beings as a whole, i.e., in the whole of this indifference.” At the same time, “Beings as a whole do not disappear, but rather show themselves precisely as such in their indifference”—and here we should immediately clarify from the earlier sentence, this would also include the being that “I” am, or Dasein as well. “The emptiness accordingly consists in indifference enveloping beings as a whole,” which Heidegger also equates with the fundamental “attunement” of metaphysical thought. Thus we find in this last form of boredom, for which Heidegger employs the simple phrase “it’s boring” or “it is boring for one” (es ist einem langweilig), there is no longer a distinction between Dasein and other beings since “the whole of being” is enveloped by all-encompassing in-difference between Being and beings.

Is this simply Heidegger’s way of approaching the existential sense of the situation where “the world is gone,” and in a manner that more closely approximates the sense that Celan and Levinas probably intend? Yes and no. First, in an affirmative sense, we find that there is an uncanny resemblance between Heidegger’s description of the day in which “one is bored” (es ist einem langeweilig) and all beings and persons are enveloped by a profound indifference, on the one hand, and Levinas’s later description of the night of the “there is” (il y a) when “all beings, things and persons revert into nothingness,” on the other. I will only highlight (i.e., “light up”) a few aspects of this resemblance.

First, in both experiences there is an intensive depersonalization and even desubjectification of the subject, or Ego, in the designation of “one is bored,” which now designates an impersonal and anonymous being.

It is boring for one. What is this “it”? The “it” that we mean whenever we say that it is thundering and lightening, that it is raining. It—this is the title for whatever is indeterminate, unfamiliar. Yet we are familiar with this, after all, and familiar with it as belonging to the more profound form of boredom: that which bores. It—one’s own self that has been left standing, the self that everyone himself or herself is, and each with this particular history, of this particular standing and age, with this name and vocation and fate; the self, one’s own beloved ego of which we say that I myself, you yourself, we ourselves are bored. Yet we are now no longer speaking of ourselves being bored with . . . but are saying: It is boring for one. It—for one—not for me as me, not for you as you, not for us as us, but for one. Name, standing, vocation, role, age and fate as mine and yours disappear.

The above passage can be placed alongside the following sentence by Levinas from the same chapter I have been reading:

There is an impersonal form, like it rains or it is warm. Its anonymity is essential. The mind does not find itself faced with an apprehended exterior. The exterior—if one insists on this term—remains uncorrelated with an interior. It is no longer given. It is no longer a world. What we call the I is itself submerged by the night, invaded, depersonalized, stifled by it.

Second, as Heidegger further clarifies the impersonal subject of the experience of profound boredom, he asks:

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”?

In other words, could this description of the subject as an “undifferentiated no one” come close to approximating Levinas’s description of the anonymous and impersonal being? For example, the following passage: “The disappearance of all things and of the I leaves what cannot disappear, the sheer fact of being in which one participates, whether one wants to or not, without having taken the initiative, anonymously.” In fact, this sentence is identical to Heidegger’s definition of the one in the statement “It is boring for one” (Es ist einem langweilig). I could go on listing passages that show this resemblance between the two descriptions, but this would get us nowhere since we don’t yet know the cause of the resemblance.

In addressing the negative sense, I will still argue that they are not addressing the same experience, since boredom still belongs to the day, while the experience of the “there is” (il y a) clearly belongs to night. Here again we might recall the following clarification by Levinas: “We could say that the night is the very experience of the ‘there is,’ if the term experience were not inapplicable to a situation which involves the total exclusion of light.” Neither is this difference a simple metaphor, as if one were to say that what Heidegger describes as profound boredom is just a form of insomnia that occurs in the middle of day. There is a different physics involved in the night that cannot be coordinated in a general form of spatiality. According to Levinas, this is because “the points of nocturnal space do not refer to each other as in illuminated space; there is no perspective, they are not situated.” In nocturnal space there is only a swarming of points in a field of forces. In other words, the day of profound boredom is not like the day where “Huffy Henry hid,” as in John Berryman’s Dream Songs, nor is the night of pure insomnia a night in which “all the world was like a woolen lover.”

Throughout his presentation of the “attunement” of profound boredom, Heidegger constantly employs the metaphor of “awakening this attunement” as a manner of saying that it is an experience that normally sleeps during the day and must be awakened forcefully. But even this gives us a hint as to the reason why this cannot be the same experience that Levinas defines as the night of the “there is,” if only because one never allows insomnia to happen, or welcomes it freely (at least at first). The approach or “invasion” of anonymous and impersonal being in the night of the “there is” is a horror that startles consciousness, from which consciousness wants to flee—that is, if all the exits were not already blocked off. Therefore, the approach of the night in which all beings, things and persons, revert to nothingness cannot be likened to an essential attunement that happens by a kind of “essential insight” (einen wesenlichen Einblick), nor the disclosure of a possible freedom that occurs when Dasein is open to it and “lets it happen”: “What it gives to be known and properly makes possible as something possible and only this, as something that that can be given to be free; what it gives to be free in its telling announcing—is nothing less than the freedom of Dasein as such. For this freedom of Dasein only is in Dasein’s freeing itself.”

Of course, I could go on all day—and all night—comparing these two very different experiences of impersonal and anonymous being, experiences that I continue to argue are as different as night and day, that is, if “being in general” was not already disqualified as a possible experience, given that there is no Subject present in the night—not even “one”! Therefore, in naming the difference between the two, I will simply say that they are completely different existential “attunements”—in short, completely different moods. In the case of the existential attunement of profound boredom, the overall and all-encompassing mood is “indifference” (Gleichgültigkeit) that covers the whole of Being; however, in the attunement that belongs to the “there is,” the dominate mood is one of “horror.” Thus, “the rustling of the there is . . . is horror.” As we already know from Sein und Zeit, moods are nothing subjective; a subject does not choose to have a mood. Instead, a mood is determined by the existential situation: that of already being delivered over to Being-in-a mood. For example, I wake up in the morning and I am already in a bad mood. Perhaps it is only the residue of the night that has vanished, but I am already caught up in this mood already. From that moment onward, I know that the whole day is fucked! I might as well go back to bed, or retire to the darkness of my cave and try to go to sleep, saying to myself, “Maybe tomorrow I will be in a better mood.” As Heidegger says: “In this ‘how one is,’, having a mood brings Being to its ‘there.’”

Moreover, if I could speculate as to the concrete existential situation that determines this difference in moods, it would simply come down to this: the mood of indifference occurs in a world where Da-sein is still free, but the mood of horror only occurs in the night, where Dasein—if we choose to employ this term—is already found to be confined. To put this more simply, the attunement of profound boredom can only be experienced by a subject who is in the world and for whom freedom remains a possibility; whereas the horror of a night when all things and persons revert to nothingness can only be experienced by a subject who is confined and for whom freedom is illusory, since, according to Levinas, the horror of a night “with no exits” (that is, to a “Being-in” which does not correspond to a “being there”) belongs only to “an irremediable existence.”

To conclude today’s reflections, I began by proposing that Heidegger’s earlier concept of world and the fundamental attunement of Dasein to Being-in-the-World (In-der-Welt-sein) needed to be revised to address these extreme existential situations . . . in (the) light of the pandemic. I will now conclude by saying that I believe I have accomplished at least a partial revision by posing Heidegger’s fundamental attunement of profound boredom in confrontation with Levinas’ description of the night of pure impersonal Being. Instead, we have discovered that the difference between the two was like night and day, except that the night of the “there is” does not belong to the same day as when “it is boring for one.” In other words, each night the world goes away, as if hurled like a meteor into the infinite void that Pascal feared, and consciousness is suddenly awakened to find itself all alone in the night and completely bodiless, cast adrift on that void. However, each day Dasein still awakens to a world in which all persons and things are covered in a great fog, as if to a day in which all the cows are white, and each successive day only feels it is becoming more and more indifferent toward all beings, including itself. At that moment, no longer capable of returning to a world wherein it was, Dasein can only retreat farther into the center of its own island and try to fall back to sleep, dreaming that one day it will learn to live in a world without others.