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On the Philosophy of Boredom

Who does not dislike the experience of boredom?  To be bored is to feel one’s time, one’s energy, one’s capacities are wasted, withering away on nothing.  But, at times, the boredom that seizes us disregards even our greatest loves: no matter the diversion attempted, boredom takes sway.  We might pick up a favorite book, only to put it down with a sigh after a few pages; or begin to watch a movie, a television show, even a live sport—and yet care not a whit for word or action on the screen, no matter how compelling the plot or play.  Chores and to-do’s are often a last resort, for at least the hope that something productive will be done and accomplished: but they seem little more than means to “pass the time”.

But this experience, with which no doubt we all are familiar, serves it seems only to cover up the fundamental and seldom-asked question—and which we intend to discuss in this week’s Philosophical Happy Hour—namely: what is boredom itself?

Kierkegaard and the Root of All Evil

“Boredom”, infamously writes Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), “is the root of all evil.”  Interpreting Kierkegaard never presents an easy task.  Is he being ironic?  Literal?  A mixture of the two?  This last seems often to be the case.  It is not, in other words, that boredom causes in the most literal sense all the evils attributed to it; but there is, no doubt, something pernicious about boredom.  What else does he have to say?

Strange that boredom, in itself so staid and stolid, should have such power to set in motion.  The influence it exerts is altogether magical, except that it is not the influence of attraction, but of repulsion.

In the case of children, the ruinous character of boredom is universally acknowledged.  Children are always well-behaved as long as they are enjoying themselves.  This is true in the strictest sense; for if they sometimes become unruly in their play, it is because they are already beginning to be bored—boredom is already approaching, through from a different direction.

1843: Either/Or, Vol.1, The “Either”, p.281.

We will pick Søren back up momentarily, but this merits a pause: do we not observe today, in the era of constant distraction from distraction by distraction, a rising unruliness in youth?  Is this indeed because they are bored—or because they do not know how to quiet their sense of boredom?  But this raises the question: what is the experience of boredom itself?  Continuing:

The history of this [world going from bad to worse, its evils increasing more and more as boredom increases] can be traced from the very beginning of the world.  The gods were bored, and so they created man.  Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created.  Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population.  Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse.   To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens.  This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand.

1843: EIther/Or, Vol.1, The “Either”, p.282.

Here we sense, no doubt, some of Kierkegaard’s characteristic irony.  But though the irony rises to the fore, laced throughout we sense a certain truth.  Much of what we do, much of what we seek, seems motivated—somehow—out of boredom; out of a kind of dissatisfaction with what we have, or a failure of that which we have to satisfy—something.  We may not even ourselves know what.  Is that vagueness itself not a part of the experience of boredom?  That is, we feel ourselves bored when we know not what would get rid of the feeling of being bored; or, if we believe something would, we do not know how to get it.

Still, this does not answer the question: what is boredom?

Heidegger and Indifference

In a lecture course given some 74 years after Kierkegaard passed, Martin Heidegger offered his own extended thoughts on boredom.  Like much of Heidegger’s work—indeed, I’d dare to say, all of it—ultimately he resolves the question into that of being and of time.  But this resolution is not without reason, and, moreover, the path he takes toward it sheds important light on the question itself.  Boredom, as he describes it, has come to the fore in our world precisely through the structures of culture.  As he writes:

Have we become too insignificant to ourselves, that we require a role?  Why do we find no meaning for ourselves any more, i.e., no essential possibility of being?  Is it because an indifference yawns at us out of all things, an indifference whose grounds we do not know?  Yet who can speak in such a way when world trade, technology, and the economy seize hold of man and keep him moving?  And nevertheless we seek a role for ourselves.  What is happening here?, we ask anew.  Must we first make ourselves interesting to ourselves again?  Why must we do this?  Perhaps because we ourselves have become bored with ourselves?  Is man himself no supposed to have become bored with himself?  Why so?  Do things ultimately stand in such a way with us that a profound boredom draws back and forth like a silent fog in the abysses of Dasein [i.e., the intentional structure of human living]?

1929-30: Die Grundbegriff der Metaphysik: Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit, p.77 in the English translation.

Heidegger goes on for quite some time (roughly 80 pages in the English translation) inquiring into the nature of boredom—examining differences of being bored and bored with and boredom itself, between superficial and profound boredom, and so on and so forth.  It is not at all, for seriously-inquiring minds (especially those already familiar with Heidegger’s philosophy), a boring read.

Homesickness and Boredom

But among the many wanderings undertaken through this contemplation, one today caught my attention.  First, he draws attention to the German word and its rather obvious etymology: Langeweile.  The English cognate—“long while”—speaks true.  But within this context, he draws an interesting and, I think, rather profound connection:

We pass the time in order to master [profound boredom], because time becomes long in boredom.  Time becomes long for us.  Is it supposed to be short, then?  Does not each of us wish for a truly long time for ourselves?  And whenever it does become long for us, we pass the time and ward off its becoming long!  We do not want to have a long time, but we have it nevertheless.  Boredom, long time: especially in Alemannic [a group of High German dialects] usage, it is no accident that ‘to have long time’ means the same as ‘to be homesick’.  In this German usage, if someone has long-time for… this means he is home sick for… Is this accidental?  Or is it only with difficulty that we are able to grasp and draw upon the wisdom of language?  Profound boredom—a homesickness.  Homesickness—philosophizing, we heard somewhere, is supposed to be a homesickness.  Boredom—a fundamental attunement of philosophizing.  Boredom—what is it?

1929-30: Die Grundbegriff der Metaphysik: Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit, p.80.

Boredom—homesickness—philosophizing.  The reference of “we heard somewhere” may be a bit of a joke, as the word used for “homesickness” here is unheimlichkeit, literally, “not-at-home-ness”.  In other works of Heidegger, such as his then-famous Being and Time, it will be translated inadequately as “uncanniness”.  But, at any rate, this merits our contemplation.  Is boredom essentially an experience of being homesick, of being “not at home”?  Homesickness itself can tell us something, I believe, about boredom.  When we are homesick, we are uncomfortable: not with the things around us, but with the absence of home.  Our attunement is to the absent and not the present.  We might lash out at the present—in the form of persons or things, in actions or thoughts—but less because of what they are than because of what they aren’t.

So too, I believe, when we are bored, we might become bored with this or that object, but less because of what it is and more because of what it isn’t.  But whereas homesickness has a specified object that it desires (even if we seldom know precisely what it is or why home satisfies us), boredom seems more fundamentally lost.  We seek, therefore, not to alleviate boredom by satisfying its fundamental desire, but by quieting it, putting it to sleep—as Heidegger says—through some distraction, some temporary movement which alleviates that sense of “not being at home”.

Philosophizing at Home

So what is it we are missing when we are bored?  And are we condemned—like Freud’s civilizational discontents—to perennial dissatisfaction, to naught but inadequate sublimations of our fundamental desire to not be bored?

Join us this Wednesday (9/13/2023) for a Philosophical Happy Hour on the topic of boredom: what is it, why do we experience, and what should we do about it?

Philosophical Happy Hour

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Come join us for drinks (adult or otherwise) and a meaningful conversation. Open to the public! Held every Wednesday from 5:45–7:15pm ET.

Hidden Hours

This post presents a quick reflection on rediscovering the hidden hours—the hours that we lose in each day. Who among us has not found him- or herself wishing for an extra hour or two in the day? For many, there seems so much to get done, and so little time in which to do it. Indeed, for many this will always be the case. I know myself that I will die long before I can read all the books. But the more-to-do than can-be-done should not dissuade us from doing. If anything, it should give us motivation to do more yet.

As Catholic readers will know, we are now in the liturgical season of Lent. In observation of this season, one takes on small mortifications, penances, and attempts to increase one’s charitable relation to others: in time, goods, services, etc. It is not uncommon to focus on the small mortifications, usually some pleasure which one gives up for these 40 days. It has been, in my own life, a usual consequence of such sacrifices that I discover new goods. This year I am fasting both from social media and from word games on my phone (the NYT Crossword and another game I regularly play on the app). Suddenly, I find myself not only with a greater amount of clock time each day—taking out all those little moments of distraction—but with a greater sense of command over how I move myself throughout the day. Other things move me less, and thus I am more in possession of myself.

(Quite coincidentally I started playing chess on my phone—the Lyceum has started a chess club. This quickly started eating back into the time. Subsequently I have limited the app to work between only the hours of 6:00—11:00pm.)

True Convenience

The conveniences of our modern technology often result in an inconvenient way of life. I suspect this appears true without explanation. But to elaborate, briefly: the word “convenient” comes from the Latin verb convenire, meaning, “to come together”. Often, Latin scholastics use the participial form, conveniens, to mean “fitting”, and even to describe a kind of argument—the argument from “fittingness”. It is good that my phone allows me to play chess with a real human being despite not having a known nearby willing opponent. But it is not fitting that I be able to play with multiple opponents all at the same time, all day long.

Two or three minutes spent on one’s phone here and there throughout the day does more than add up to hours. Rather, it knocks one out of the natural rhythm of the day. In other words, our days have fitting and unfitting rhythms. Phones are not the only devices, of course, which do this. The computer has many ways to distract us also. Truly, it is death by a thousand cuts.

This point deserves more than I can give it now. Doubtless it will play a prominent role in our planned 2024 seminar on Technology (a frequent topic for the Lyceum). But suffice it here to say that—if our technology is not to distort our lives, if our conveniences for this or that particular activity are not to destroy the convenientia of our whole lives—we must reflect more thoughtfully on what our lives are ordered towards and how those technologies distort that ordering.

Using our Time Wisely

I rather dislike the notion of “using” or “spending” time. The phrase is useful; but it, too, is unfitting. For time is not a resource. If one cannot store it, one cannot spend it. We misconstrue what time is by thinking of it this way. If we make “good use” of time, it is by the motions which we direct ourselves to perform. But, in truth, we can only “spend” our time wisely if we orient ourselves to goods that are timeless. Truth and love do not wane with the passage of minutes or hours, years, decades, or even centuries. Steadfastly holding ourselves to them, we, too, will find that our days contain hidden hours, retrieved not by better “time management” but by a fittingness of our thought.

Wholes and Parts: A Thomistic Refutation of Brain Death

In the first Lyceum Institute Colloquium of 2021, we present our own Michel Accad, MD, who will take us through a discussion of “brain death” as a supposed criterion for determining the presence of life in a human being. This colloquium lecture is based upon and expository of a paper Dr. Accad published in 2015, available here, and which you are all encouraged to read. There is also a response by Jason Eberl, PhD, and a further rejoinder to said response by Dr. Accad.

ORIGINAL PAPER ABSTRACT: I propose a refutation of the two major arguments that support the concept of “brain death” as an ontological equivalent to death of the human organism. I begin with a critique of the notion that a body part, such as the brain, could act as “integrator” of a whole body. I then proceed with a rebuttal of the argument that destruction of a body part essential for rational operations—such as the brain—necessarily entails that the remaining whole is indisposed to accrue a rational soul. Next, I point to the equivocal use of the terms “alive” or “living” as being at the root of conceptual errors about brain death. I appeal to the Thomistic definition of life and to the hylomorphic concept of “virtual presence” to clarify this confusion. Finally, I show how the Thomistic definition of life supports the traditional criterion for the determination of death.

Lay summary: By the mid-1960s, medical technology became available that could keep “alive” the bodies of patients who had sustained complete and irreversible brain injury. The concept of “brain death” emerged to describe such states. Physicians, philosophers, and ethicists then proposed that the state of brain death is equivalent to the state of death traditionally identified by the absence of spontaneous pulse and respiration. This article challenges the major philosophical arguments that have been advanced to draw this equivalence.

Dr. Accad’s lecture is now available to all members at the Lyceum Institute. The live question and answer session will be held on 9 July 2021 (Friday) at 6:30pm ET/3:30pm PT. Colloquia lectures are released the year after publication at the Lyceum, and Q&A sessions are reserved for members. For information on signing up for the Lyceum, see here.

Hope in a Nihilist World

Often, we speak of despair as something not that we do but something which seizes us, as a force outside of ourselves.  We conceive of despair as a blackness, a void, an emptiness into which we fall, into which we are dragged.  The more we find ourselves to experience something missing in our lives, no matter what we do or in what we place our hopes, the more we incline to despair.  And thus, despite the love of the true and the good rooted in our deepest natural yearnings, we submerge ourselves in a black meaninglessness.

So how are we, today, to find hope–that of which despair is a rejection and a loss?

This is the first lecture in the Ethics: Good Life seminar, posted in full:

Ethics: The Good Life – Against the Nihilist Noise

If you would like to attend the rest of the seminar — discussion sessions begin on 1/16 — you can sign up here. This seminar is being offered for as little as $20 for the full eight weeks, so it’s quite a steal.