it must, insofar as it is, be concerned in one way or another with being—we call care. In giving it this name, we are not raising to the level of a metaphysical concept or making into a worldview one of those feelings familiar in the everyday realm—fear, anxiety, care, and the like. Rather, it is the fundamental experience of the essence of the historical Dasein of the human being that in the first instance demands to be named and that, whenever it is accomplished, can be conceived only from out of this origin.
If we ponder the essence of fundamental attunement and its power to transport us out and transport us into, to open up, and to ground, then it immediately becomes clear that attunement is what is least of all subjective or a so-called interior of the human being; for fundamental attunement is, by contrast, the way in which we are originarily transposed into the expanse of beings and the depths of beyng. The human being’s going into him-or herself does not here mean staring at or monitoring one’s private lived experiences; rather, it means going out into one’s exposure to beings as manifest. Only because fundamental attunement originarily transports and transposes us can it also limit Dasein, restricting it to the sphere of those everyday beings that are closest to us, letting Dasein drift along on the surface of beyng. For fundamental attunement is in each case this or that attunement: not some fixed attribute, but a happening. Human Dasein is indeed always attuned, if only in the manner of a bad or disgruntled mood, or in the peculiar manner of that mood that is familiar to us as the dull, vacuous, and dreary lack of attunement, familiar to us in the everyday realm as that which we express in the statement “I’m not up for anything”—the primordial form of boredom, which for its part can unfold into a fundamental attunement. Because Dasein—insofar as it is—is attuned, for this reason an attunement can in each case be changed into a different one only by way of a counter-attunement. And only a fundamental attunement is capable of bringing about a change of attunement from the ground up—that is, a transformation of Dasein that amounts to a complete recreating of its exposure to beings, and thereby to a recoining of beyng.
The fact that, within modern thinking, and already prior to it, attunements are counted as something ‘subjective’—as merely accompanying us in each case and as what are least graspable—is no accident, nor a mere inattentiveness or even incapacity on the part of psychological inspection. This is the case if only because experiencing the essence of attunement remains impossible so long as one views the issue psychologically and portrays the human being as a subject that is, in addition, surrounded by so-called objects—though why, one really does not know. As though subject and object were fixed blocks