-A Philosophy of Boredom, Lars Svendsen
Jari passed this on to me with an arch and knowing look! The title is more than a little "nudge-nudge", but I suppose even philosophers need a marketing strategy. To be perfectly honest, I don't really like "philosophy". As currently practised it seems to have precious little to do with any genuine love of wisdom. Philosophical argument always sounds to me like a too-clever 6th-former trying to talk away the embarrassing reality of the elephant in the room. The elephant is the tremendous, terrifying, naked reality of existence itself, which is per se beyond the comprehension of mere discursive reasoning. To protect his sense of self-importance from the horrendous implications of the infinite void of space, our schoolboy sage arms himself with vocabulary. Like a horror-movie spider he spins a web of mind-numbing verbal complexity around the elephant until it is entirely immobilised in a silken shroud, utterly at the mercy of our arachnoid-penseur. The life-blood is then slowly but steadily sucked out of reality. The dried and shrunken carcass is then fought over by an army of fellow-spiders, who, unable to extract any real nourishment from the dessicated remains, nevertheless continue spinning in order to enhance their personal status through attempting to weave the most pointlessly ingenious web.
Having said that, "A Philosophy of Boredom" remains just about readable, although there are enough "ontologicals", "epistemologicals" and "hermeneutics" to cause me to release the safety-catch on my critical pistol. Thanks to Pierre Bayard (see previous entry), I have lost all shame and turned directly to the end to see what conclusion the philosopher was able to reach:
Boredom has to be accepted as an unavoidable fact, as life's own gravity. This is no grand solution, for the problem of boredom has none.
Well, thanks. If I were Jari, I'd ask for my money back!
The book is divided into four parts. The first part, "The Problem of Boredom", basically says that there are two sorts of boredom: 1. Temporary boredom, when something interesting will come along later, and 2. Existential boredom, which is essentially a sort of depression resulting from a failure of meaning. This second type is increasingly prevalent in the modern world. Part Two is "Stories of Boredom", historical examples of boredom. An interesting section here on Andy Warhol who affected to embrace meaninglessness and boredom as an aesthetic stance. Part Four, "The Ethics of Boredom", basically says that that's the way it is and we have to learn to put up with it. Part Three, "The Phenomenology of Boredom", is the most interesting. Svendsen explores (and high-handedly rejects) Heidegger's contention that (I summarize) existential boredom is a precursor of a transcendental epiphany. I can go through boredom and come out the other side, in other words. A bit like Kirkegaard's "Earthly hope must be killed; only then can we be saved by true hope" (see earlier entry). If I were truly able to experience and acknowledge my inner emptiness, I would have in me a space which could be filled with a sense of reality. As it is, I am never sufficiently bored with the dreams and pretensions which bolster my ordinary imagination of myself to be able to leave a space for something greater, something unknown. But the elephant is always in the room. Do we dare embrace it?
Jari passed this on to me with an arch and knowing look! The title is more than a little "nudge-nudge", but I suppose even philosophers need a marketing strategy. To be perfectly honest, I don't really like "philosophy". As currently practised it seems to have precious little to do with any genuine love of wisdom. Philosophical argument always sounds to me like a too-clever 6th-former trying to talk away the embarrassing reality of the elephant in the room. The elephant is the tremendous, terrifying, naked reality of existence itself, which is per se beyond the comprehension of mere discursive reasoning. To protect his sense of self-importance from the horrendous implications of the infinite void of space, our schoolboy sage arms himself with vocabulary. Like a horror-movie spider he spins a web of mind-numbing verbal complexity around the elephant until it is entirely immobilised in a silken shroud, utterly at the mercy of our arachnoid-penseur. The life-blood is then slowly but steadily sucked out of reality. The dried and shrunken carcass is then fought over by an army of fellow-spiders, who, unable to extract any real nourishment from the dessicated remains, nevertheless continue spinning in order to enhance their personal status through attempting to weave the most pointlessly ingenious web.
Having said that, "A Philosophy of Boredom" remains just about readable, although there are enough "ontologicals", "epistemologicals" and "hermeneutics" to cause me to release the safety-catch on my critical pistol. Thanks to Pierre Bayard (see previous entry), I have lost all shame and turned directly to the end to see what conclusion the philosopher was able to reach:
Boredom has to be accepted as an unavoidable fact, as life's own gravity. This is no grand solution, for the problem of boredom has none.
Well, thanks. If I were Jari, I'd ask for my money back!
The book is divided into four parts. The first part, "The Problem of Boredom", basically says that there are two sorts of boredom: 1. Temporary boredom, when something interesting will come along later, and 2. Existential boredom, which is essentially a sort of depression resulting from a failure of meaning. This second type is increasingly prevalent in the modern world. Part Two is "Stories of Boredom", historical examples of boredom. An interesting section here on Andy Warhol who affected to embrace meaninglessness and boredom as an aesthetic stance. Part Four, "The Ethics of Boredom", basically says that that's the way it is and we have to learn to put up with it. Part Three, "The Phenomenology of Boredom", is the most interesting. Svendsen explores (and high-handedly rejects) Heidegger's contention that (I summarize) existential boredom is a precursor of a transcendental epiphany. I can go through boredom and come out the other side, in other words. A bit like Kirkegaard's "Earthly hope must be killed; only then can we be saved by true hope" (see earlier entry). If I were truly able to experience and acknowledge my inner emptiness, I would have in me a space which could be filled with a sense of reality. As it is, I am never sufficiently bored with the dreams and pretensions which bolster my ordinary imagination of myself to be able to leave a space for something greater, something unknown. But the elephant is always in the room. Do we dare embrace it?
posted by asbo at 1:58 PM
2 Comments:
Isn't boredom one possibe translation of "ennui" ? Ennui is so passé, though, so boring. Philosophers need to get a life. Return to the wonder of being - firstly by opening the senses, as man's condition is wonderfully physical, secondly by accepting that there are moments of stasis where nothing much happens but it is just good to be alive, thirdly by then feeling the self dissolve into something greater, more spiritual. Boredom is a failure to be awake.
Ah - perhaps the blogger has been let down by his cheerful and optimistic nature! Having a close and detailed look at the elephant, may, though failing to give us an eternal truth, shed some new light nonetheless. And that is what Mr. Svendsen does. Reading a book like this is like playing the blues: the point is to get out of the miserable reality, at least for a moment, not getting into the blues.
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