Heeding the Call of Being: Heidegger on Attention and Authenticity Ringmar, Erik 2015 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Ringmar, E. (2015). Heeding the Call of Being: Heidegger on Attention and Authenticity. Paper presented at Heidegger and the Global Age: An International Conference, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom. Total number of authors: 1 General rights Unless other specific re-use rights are stated the following general rights apply: Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Read more about Creative commons licenses: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. LUND UNIVERSITY PO Box 117 221 00 Lund +46 46-222 00 00 Quote as Ringmar, Erik, “Heeding the Call of Being: Heidegger on Attention and Authenticity.” Paper presented at Heidegger and the Global Age: An International Workshop, University of Sussex, Brighton, October 29-30, 2015. Heeding the Call of Being: Heidegger on Attention and Authenticity Erik Ringmar, Dept of Political Science, Lund University The thought of Martin Heidegger has little relevance for international politics. Heidegger did not write about international politics and his Being-in-the-world cannot be mapped onto any of the beings in the world which scholars of international relations study. And yet, as we will argue below, Heidegger's philosophy developed in close interaction with themes discussed by social thinkers of his day — a proximity which often is concealed by the technical vocabulary he uses — and his Dasein is for that reason never only a timeless abstraction but also a historical construction. Heidegger writes about life in modern society, about a modern predicament, and as such he too is a social thinker of sorts. Indeed, some of his main themes — the discussion of moods such as boredom and anxiety, the problem of mass society, and the challenge of how to live an authentic life — were very much discussed by his contemporaries too. However, Heidegger's conclusions differ radically in crucial respects, and this, we will argue, is precisely why he should be of interest to us. It is because his thought tells us nothing about international politics that he is relevant to international politics.1 In order to unpack this rather gnomic statement, we need first to consider the historical background. In the decades prior to Heidegger's Being and Time, 1927, Europe had gone through a quick process of modernization, not least in the case of Germany. In the short span of a few decades, rural, agricultural, society had been transformed into an urban, industrial, society. In the new cities people often felt lost and lonely, yet 1 A kindred argument is Thiele, “Heidegger on Freedom.” 1 / 24 everywhere they found themselves the members of crowds. As one face among many in a mass society, contemporary observers argued, people were quite indistinguishable from each other and most of them passively conformed to social norms and received opinions. People were like sleepwalkers, it was often noticed; they were passive and suggestible and they lived perfectly inauthentic lives. The solution most commonly advocated — indeed the remedy universally prescribed — was to tell people to “strengthen their will” and to “assert themselves.” The themes of will-power and self-assertion were discussed as matters of individual psychology, not least in a slew of self-help books and manuals on “physical culture” and calisthenics. But they were also discussed as matters of political action. A passive and weak-willed person could assert himself by means of physical force; he could strengthen his will by engaging in heroic actions — by going to war, for example, or by going off to fight the natives in some far-flung colony. This is how the rhetoric of self-assertion through military action came to permeate European societies in the first decades of the twentieth-century, creating an affective environment in which wars were more likely and the rhetoric of bellicose dictatorships more persuasive. Self- assertion led to genocide. Heidegger, however, drew completely different conclusions. Although his themes — when recast as sociology — were much the same as those of his contemporaries, “the will” was not an important category for him, and “self-assertion” could never be a matter of asserting a self which existed primordially and in opposition to society. In contrast to Nietzsche, Heidegger described no Übermensch and no “will to power.” Although he diagnosed the social malaise in much the same manner as his contemporaries, that is, his remedies were entirely different. Heidegger is irrelevant to international politics since his philosophy has no bellicose or aggressive implications, but this is precisely why he should be of interest to us. Heidegger provided an alternative solution to the problem of life in modern society, and thereby another solution to the problem of how human beings can learn to live with each other and with the earth they inhabit. As we will argue in what follows, instead of self-assertion, Heidegger emphasized 2 / 24 the importance of attention. Attention too was a topic much discussed during the first decades of the twentieth-century and it was treated at great length by the leading psychologists of the day, not least in Germany. In modern society, in contrast to life in traditional society, you were constantly forced to pay attention — to the fast pace of city life; to the machine which you worked at; to instructions from school teachers and government officials, and so on. It is consequently not surprising that attention features prominently in Heidegger's thought too. Indeed, it is more than anything by studying how attention flags, is distracted or overwhelmed, that we can find Dasein stripped of all its psychological and sociological characteristics. The challenge concerning how to construct an authentic life can from this point of view be understood as a question of how to pay attention to Being. Attention understood as heeding, we will argue, is a solicitous looking out for; it is to attentively keep one's eyes on the horizon. As human beings we have the remarkable opportunity to be present when Being presents itself. Paying heed to this event is to live an authentic life. Moods and the search for Being A discussion of moods is the best place to start. In our everyday vocabulary of affect, references to moods are often freely mixed with references to emotions and to feelings. We “feel” a certain way, we say, meaning that we have certain “emotions” or that we are in a certain “mood.” However, a more careful use of these terms distinguishes between different uses.2 Basically, emotions have cognitive content whereas moods do not. Emotions are about something or someone whereas moods concern a more general attitude or stance. Moods are not affective states which we have as much as affective states which we go through and experience. This gives moods a curiously impersonal and objective quality. We find ourselves in a certain mood, we say. Thus understood, moods are features of the situation in which we are placed rather than of our mental 2 See, for example, Carroll, “Art and Mood”; Ratcliffe, “Heidegger’s Attunement and the Neuropsychology of Emotion”; Ratcliffe, “The Feeling of Being.” 3 / 24 make-up, or perhaps rather, they are features of the interaction between a person and a situation. The mood is a question of whether, and how, we fit into a certain situation; it is a question of how we are attuned to the world.3 When somebody asks us how we feel, we tell them — “I feel rootless,” we say, “worried,” “hopeful,” “pensive” or “over the moon.” Answers such as these provide a report on the mood we are in. In works published in the 1920s, Heidegger discusses two examples of moods at some considerable length — anxiety, Angst, in Being and Time, 1927, and boredom in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 1930.4 What he engaged in here is not a psychological investigation but a phenomenological. He is not interested in people, how they react or how they feel, but in what their reactions and their feelings can tell us about the human condition, about the world and our selves. Take boredom. In Fundamental Concepts, Heidegger discusses three examples of boredom, going from the most mundane case to the most profound. He finds himself sitting in a train station, he begins by telling us; he has missed his train and he has nothing to do while waiting for the next train to show up.5 He tries to read a book, but the story does not interest him; he draws circles in the sand outside the station; he looks at his watch; counts the trees along the road; looks at his watch again. He is suffering from Langeweile, “long while,” indicating the way time itself seems to have been lengthened and started to drag. Boredom here is an emotion; he is bored by the situation. Heidegger provides a second example.6 He has been working successfully all day, he tells us, when a friend invites him to a dinner party.