Heidegger's Dinner Party: The Pleasant Evening That Turned Out to Be Boring

There is nothing at all to be found that might have been boring about this evening, neither the conversation, nor the people, nor the rooms. Thus we come home quite satisfied.

That is Martin Heidegger, lecturing at the University of Freiburg in the winter semester of 1929-30, in the course published in English as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker, Indiana University Press, 1995). A few lines later: “and then it comes: I was bored after all this evening, on the occasion of this invitation.”

The short answer to what he is describing: it is a kind of boredom with no cause you can point to, which only shows up once the evening is over. Heidegger calls it being bored with something, as opposed to being bored by something. The practical lesson, which is mine and not his, is that a pleasant evening with people you like can still be a wasted one, and the fix is to give the evening something to do, not to find better company.

What happens at the dinner party?

The scene is deliberately plain. Heidegger says he wants a case that is “distinctly everyday, accessible to everybody and almost inconspicuous.” We have been invited out. We “do not need to go along,” but we have been tense all day and have time that evening, so we go. There is “the usual food and the usual table conversation,” all of it “very tasty” and tasteful. People sit and talk, “things are witty and amusing.” The guests assure us on the way out that it was terribly charming. We walk home satisfied, glance at the work we left on the desk, plan tomorrow, and the verdict arrives.

Then comes the part I find most true. He tests the obvious explanations and rejects them. Was he bored with himself? No, he was “totally involved, involved in and part of the conversation.” Is it a sour mood about the lost hours? “No: it is quite clear that we were bored, even though it was all so pleasant.” He suspects that blaming the pleasantness sounds like the complaint of a jaded person, and says he is asking not whether the boredom was justified but what it consists of.

My reading is that he ends up with two features. First, “we have left ourselves time for the evening”: we were not watching the clock, as we would at a station, and time was going “neither too slowly nor too quickly.” Second, the passing of the time was hidden inside the participation. The whole evening, he says, “must be organized as a way of passing the time,” and because the passing of time is identical with taking part in the evening, we do not notice that it is what we are doing.

Why is the station boredom different?

Heidegger’s first example comes earlier in the course: sitting “in the tasteless station of some lonely minor railway,” four hours until the next train. We look at the timetable, study the table of distances to other places, check the clock again and again. Here the boredom is loud. It has an obvious source, we know we are fighting it, and we fidget. Our passing of the time is conspicuous to us.

At the dinner, the boredom has no obvious source and the fidgeting is invisible. He underlines that length is not what matters: “we can indeed be more bored in someone’s company for five minutes than during the whole four hours we are waiting at the station.”

He also makes a point that cuts against the usual advice. The person at the station who is short of time, in a hurry, unwilling to lose any of it, looks like the serious one. But he suggests that having no time “is ultimately a greater being lost of the self” than the wasting of time by someone who leaves themselves time, and that “the ‘having no time’ that looks like the most rigorous seriousness is perhaps the way in which we are most lost in the banalities of Dasein.” He then declines to say the dinner guest is therefore the deeper case. He says it is “not at all so easy” to rank the two. The course runs on to a third form, profound boredom, which he puts as: “it is boring for one.” There the boredom no longer attaches to a situation or to ‘me’, but to an indeterminate ‘it’ and to ‘one’. I have not tried to summarize that part, and this post is about the middle one.

What does a flat evening look like in a group of friends?

This passage stays with me because it describes a failure no checklist would catch. Nobody was rude, the food was fine, and there was no awkward silence to point to. Ask the guests the next day and most will say it was nice, as the ladies in the lecture did on the pavement.

Plenty of friendships run mostly on this kind of evening: the usual place, the usual order, the usual subjects, and nothing in it asks anything of you. What you take home is a pleasant residue that is hard to tell apart from last month’s.

That matches, loosely, a finding in the diary study I wrote about in a post on curious days versus pleasant days: in 97 students followed for 21 days, a pleasant day lifted well-being on that day and left nothing for the next, while a curious day carried a small boost forward. The study measured students’ ratings, not dinner parties, so the link is suggestive and nothing stronger.

Is this boredom, as psychologists define it?

Not quite, and the gap is instructive. In 2012 Eastwood, Frischen, Fenske and Smilek published a paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science titled “The Unengaged Mind,” proposing that boredom be defined as the aversive state of not being able to engage attention with what is needed for satisfying activity, while being aware of that failure and blaming the surroundings. I have read only the abstract.

On that definition, the dinner guest is not bored while sitting there. He is engaged, he is not aware of failing, and he blames nothing. The verdict only arrives at the door of his own study. So either Heidegger is describing something other than boredom as measured in a lab, or the lab definition catches only the loud variety, the station kind. I lean toward the first reading, with low confidence; I found no experiment that settles it.

The loud kind is the one that has been studied. In the 2014 Science paper by Timothy Wilson and colleagues, across 11 studies people typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes alone with nothing to do but think, and many preferred to give themselves electric shocks instead; I went through the details in an earlier post on that study. That is a station: an empty room, a clock, an obvious wish to be out. The dinner party is the opposite experimental condition, a room full of stimulation where nobody ever reaches for the shock button, because nothing feels wrong.

How would you plan an evening differently?

None of this is Heidegger’s advice. He says plainly that “it is not a matter of taking a definition of boredom home with you.” He is asking what boredom reveals about being a creature that has time. What follows is my extrapolation, offered as experiments.

Give the evening a task with an outcome. In his account the boredom arises when the evening is simply to be got through: the hours are there, and we go along. A shared task changes what the hours are for. Cook something none of you has made and see if it works. Walk to a place no one has been. Build, repair, plan a trip you may really take. The test is whether at the end something exists that did not exist at the start, even if it is only a mediocre loaf.

Ask one question that has no polite answer. The pleasant dinner in the lecture runs on “the usual table conversation.” If each person arrives with one thing they are unsure about, a decision, an argument they lost, a thing they want to understand, the conversation has somewhere to go besides the weather and the news. This is the same logic as the information gap in Loewenstein’s account of curiosity, though I am leaning on it by analogy here, not by evidence.

Change the method before the scenery. Kierkegaard’s advice in “The Rotation of Crops” was to vary how you approach the same things; that essay and its rotation method are a companion piece to this one. For dinners it means keeping the friends and the table and altering one rule: no phones is the obvious one, but a stranger one works too, such as everyone cooking from a single ingredient, or each person hosting one course in a different home.

Keep some evenings small and unplanned. A task can turn into a performance, and a friend group that treats every Friday as a project will tire of it. Berlyne’s curve, discussed in the post on too boring and too chaotic, is a reminder that there is a middle band and that you can overshoot it. A ratio of one organized evening to three ordinary ones is a guess, not a number from any study.

Run the morning-after check. The dinner guest found out only at his desk. Ask yourself the next morning what you would tell someone about last night. Count what comes. If you do it several times, you will learn which of your regular evenings produce material and which produce a nice feeling and nothing else. Decide in advance what counts: a fact, a decision, a plan, a laugh you can reconstruct.

What does the passage not show?

Heidegger was not studying friend groups. He was using a dinner party to expose a structure of human time, and the course goes on to argue that boredom opens onto questions about world, finitude and solitude. Reading him as a social planner turns that around. The evidence that task-centred evenings feel better than conversation-centred ones, as far as I know, is not strong, and I have not found a study that compares them. Some people may also just find a good dinner party tiring and call it boredom afterward.

I read the passages quoted here in an archive.org scan of the McNeill and Walker translation, a text layer produced by optical character recognition, and checked them against a second online edition of the same translation for the later sections. If you quote him, check the printed book. The scene appears around pages 165 to 167 of the German volume (GA 29/30), which the translation marks in brackets.

The oddest thing about the dinner party is that Heidegger’s guest does the sensible thing. He goes, he joins in, he enjoys himself, and he is right to say so. What he cannot say is why the pleasant hours came to nothing, and the only evidence he has is a small private verdict at a desk, late, with nobody to tell. Most of us have had that walk home, and few of us checked afterward which evenings gave it to us.