Ungestimmtheit

a-tonie [ETEM]

The uniformity characteristic of everydayness is well called “monotony,” for it reveals itself to the “individual” here-being in the attunement of a “dull untunedness” (fahle Ungestimmtheit), in a “lack of tone” that is familiar to all of us. Indeed, all the varied characteristics of everyday existence are ontically so well known that they are hardly noticed, but for the existential-ontological investigation they harbor “enigma upon enigma.” It is the baffling character of everydayness that reveals the insufficiency of the preceding explanations of temporality. They have brought here-being to a standstill in a certain situation—that is, they have analyzed only the structure of temporality itself, while completely disregarding that here-being stretches itself “temporally” in the succession of its days. “The monotony, the habit, the ‘like yesterday, so today and tomorrow,’ and the ‘for the most part,’ cannot be grasped without recourse to the ‘temporal’ stretching along of Dasein” (SZ, 371). [GHBT:291]