boredom and meaning

That boredom is probably more widespread than ever before can be established by noting that the number of ‘social placebos’ is greater than it has ever been.1 If there are more substitutes for meaning, there must be more meaning that needs to be substituted.2 Where there is a lack of personal meaning, all sorts of diversions have to create a substitute – an ersatz-meaning. Or the cult of celebrities, where one gets completely engrossed in the lives of others because one’s own life lacks meaning. Is our fascination with the bizarre, fed daily by the mass media, not a result of our awareness of the boring? The pell-mell rush for diversions precisely indicates our fear of the emptiness that surrounds us. This rush, the demand for satisfaction and the lack ofsatisfaction are inextricably intertwined. The more strongly individual life becomes the centre of focus, the stronger the insistence on meaning amongst the trivialities of everyday life will become. Because man a couple of centuries ago, began to see himself as an individual being that must realize himself, everyday life now appears to be a prison. Boredom is not connected with actual needs but with desire. And this desire is a desire for sensory stimuli. Stimuli are the only ‘interesting’ thing.
That life to a large extent is boring is revealed by our placing such great emphasis on originality and innovation.3 We place greater emphasis nowadays on whether something is ‘interesting’ than on whether it has any ‘value’. To consider something exclusively from the point of view of whether it is ‘interesting’ or not is to consider it from a purely aesthetic perspective. The aesthetic gaze registers only surface, and this surface is judged by whether it is interesting or boring. To what extent something lands up in the one category or the other will often be a question of potency of effect: if a piece of recorded music seems boring, it sometimes helps to turn up the volume. The aesthetic gaze has to be titillated by increased intensity or preferably by something new, and the ideology of the aesthetic gaze is superlativism. It is, however, worth noting that the aesthetic gaze has a tendency to fall back into boredom – a boredom that defines the entire content of life in a negative way, because it is that which has to be avoided at any price. This was perhaps particularly evident in postmodern theory, where we saw a series of jouissance aesthetes,with such mantras as ‘intensity’, delirium’ and ‘euphoria’. The problem was that the postmodern state was not all that euphoric and joyful for very long. It soon became boring.
We cannot adopt a stance towards something without there being an underlying interest, for interest provides the direction.4 But, as Heidegger emphasised, today’s interest is only directed towards the interesting, and the interesting is what only a moment later one finds indifferent or boring.5 The word ‘boring’ is bound up with the word ‘interesting’; the words become widespread at roughly the same time and they increase in frequency at roughly the same rate.6 It is not until the advent of Romanticism towards the end of the eighteenth century that the demand arises for life to be interesting, with the general claim that the self must realize itself. Karl Philipp Moritz, whose importance for German Romanticism has only recently been truly recognized, claimed in 1787 that a connection between interest and boredom exists, and that life must be interesting to avoid ‘unbearable boredom’.7 The ‘interesting’ always has a brief shelf-life, and really no other function than to be consumed, in order that boredom can be kept at arm’s length. The prime commodity of the media is ‘interesting information’ – signs that are pure consumer goods, nothing else.
In his essay ‘The Narrator’, Walter Benjamin insisted that ‘experience has fallen in value’.8 This is connected to the emergence of a new form of communication in high capitalism: information. ‘Information [ . . . ] lays claim to prompt verifiability. The prime requirement is that it appear “understandable in itself” [ . . . ] no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation.’9 While experience gives personal meaning, this is undermined by information.10 At about the same time as Benjamin made his observation, T. S. Eliot wrote:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?11

We know that information and meaning are not the same thing. Broadly speaking, meaning consists in inserting small parts into a larger, integrated context, while information is the opposite. Information is ideally communicated as a binary code, while meaning is communicated more symbolically. Information is handled or ‘processed’, while meaning is interpreted.12 Now is it obvious that we cannot simply choose to do without information in favour of meaning, for if one is to be reasonably functional in today’s world, one has to be able to deal critically with an abundance of information communicated via many different links. Anyone insisting on gleaning all experiences personally would definitely come a cropper. The problem is that modern technology more and more makes us passive observers and consumers, and less and less active players. This gives us a meaning deficit.
It is not all that easy to give an account of what I mean by ‘meaning’ here. In philosophical semantics there are a host of different theories about meaning that – especially in continuation of the works of Gottlob Frege – seek to provide an account of meaning in terms of linguistic expression. But the concept of meaning I am referring to has a further perspective, because we are talking about a meaning that is inextricably linked to being a meaning for someone. Peter Wessel Zapffe attempted to articulate a concept of meaning:

That an action or some other fragment of life has meaning means that it gives us a quite specific feeling that is not easy to translate into thought. It would have to be something like the action having a good enough intention, so that when the intention is fulfilled, the action is ‘justified’, settled, confirmed – and the subject calms down.13

This is an odd sort of definition, but it contains the vital element – that this meaning is related to a person’s goaloriented use of the world. At this point, I would just mention that an important difference between Zapffe’s and my concept of meaning was that he justifies it biologically, while I justify it more historically. As Zapffe also indicates, these actions also point forward to something more – to life as a whole. I do not intend to pursue Zapffe’s considerations here, but will content myself with stating that the meaning we are looking for – or even demand – is ultimately an existential or metaphysical meaning.14 This existential meaning can be sought in various ways and exists in various forms. It can be conceived as something already given in which one can participate (e.g. in a religious community) or as something that has to be realized (e.g. a classless society). It is conceived as something collective or something individual. I would also assert that the conception of meaning that is particularly prevalent in the West from Romanticism onwards is that which conceives existential meaning as an individual meaning that has to be realized. It is this meaning that I refer to as a personal meaning, but I could also call it the Romantic meaning.
Human beings are addicted to meaning. We all have a great problem: Our lives must have some sort of content. We cannot bear to live our lives without some sort of content that we can see as constituting a meaning. Meaninglessness is boring. And boredom can be described metaphorically as a meaning withdrawal. Boredom can be understood as a discomfort which communicates that the need for meaning is not being satisfied. In order to remove this discomfort, we attack the symptoms rather than the disease itself, and search for all sorts of meaning-surrogates.
A society that functions well promotes man’s ability to find meaning in the world; one that functions badly does not. In premodern societies there was usually a collective meaning that was sufficient.15 For us ‘Romantics’, things are more problematic, for even though we often embrace collectivist modes of thought, such as nationalism, they always ultimately appear to be sadly insufficient. Of course, there is still meaning, but there seems to be less of it. Information, on the other hand, there is plenty of. Modern media have made an enormous search for knowledge possible – something that undeniably has positive aspects, but by far the most of it is irrelevant noise. If, on the other hand, we choose to use the word ‘meaning’ in a broad sense, there is no lack of meaning in the world – there is a superabundance. We positively wade through meaning. But this meaning is not the meaning we are looking for. The emptiness of time in boredom is not an emptiness of action, for there is always something in this time, even if it is only the sight of paint drying. The emptiness of time is an emptiness of meaning.
Horkheimer and Adorno made a point that is close to Benjamin’s assertion concerning the growth of information. In continuation of Kant’s theory of interpretation, schematism, they wrote that

The contribution that Kantian schematism still expected of the subjects – relating in advance the sensory diversity to the underlying concepts – was taken from them by industry. It carries out schematism like a service for the customer . . . For the consumer there is nothing left to
classify that has not already been anticipated in production’s own schematism.16

I believe that boredom is the result of a lack of personal meaning, and that this to a great extent is due precisely to the fact that all objects and actions come to us fully coded, while we – as the descendants of Romanticism – insist on a personal meaning. As Rilke wrote in the first of his Duino Elegies, we are not as a matter of course completely at home in the interpreted world. Man is a world-forming being, a being that actively constitutes his own world, but when everything is always already fully coded, the active constituting of the world is made superfluous, and we lose friction in relation to the world.We Romantics need a meaning that we ourselves realize – and the person who is preoccupied with self-realization inevitably has a meaning problem. This is no one collective meaning in life any more, a meaning that it is up to the individual to participate in. Nor is it that easy to find an own meaning in life, either. The meaning that most people embrace is self-realization as such, but it is not obvious what type of self is to be realized, nor what should possibly result from it. The person who is certain as regards himself will not ask the question as to who he is. Only a problematic self feels the need for realization.
Boredom presupposes subjectivity, i.e., self-awareness. Subjectivity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for boredom. To be able to be bored the subject must be able to perceive himself as an individual that can enter into various meaning contexts, and this subject demands meaning of the world and himself. Without such a demand formeaning there would be no boredom. Animals can be understimulated, but hardly bored.17 As Robert Nisbet has argued:

Man is apparently unique in his capacity for boredom. We share with all forms of life periodic apathy, but apathy and boredom are different . . . Boredom is much farther up the scale of afflictions than is apathy, and it is probably only a nervous system as highly developed as
man’s is even capable of boredom. And within the human species, a level of mentality at least ‘normal’ appears to be a requirement. The moron may know apathy but not boredom.18

Goethe remarked somewhere that monkeys would be worth considering as humans if they were capable of being bored – and he may well be right about that. At the same time, boredom is inhuman because it robs human life of meaning, or possibly it is an expression of the fact that such a meaning is absent.
With Romanticism there comes a strong focusing on a self that is constantly in danger of acquiring a meaning deficiency. The growth of boredom is linked to the growth of nihilism, but the problem-history of nihilism, and possibly its end, is a terribly complex issue of its own and will not be dealt with here to any great extent. Boredom and nihilism converge in the death of God. The first importance use of the concept of nihilism in philosophy is in F. H. Jacobi’s ‘Brief an Fichte’ (1799).19 One of the main points made by Jacobi in this open letter is that man has chosen between God and nothingness, and by choosing nothingness man makes himself a god. This logic is later reiterated, but this time in the affirmative, by Kirilov in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed: ‘If God does not exist, then I become God.’20 As we know, we chose nothingness, although the word ‘choose’ is probably misleading here – it happened. But man did not fulfil the role of a god all that successfully. Kirilov also claims that in the absence of God ‘I am obliged to express my own wilfulness.’ In the absence of God man assumed the role of gravitational centre for meaning – but this was a role he managed to fill only to a small extent.

Let us not forget, however, that boredom, despite everything, is only one aspect of existence. Everything else does not deserve to be reduced to simply representing the boring or the interesting. Nor does boredom refer to a great hidden meaning, as Heidegger imagined. It springs from a lack of meaning, but such a lack cannot guarantee that there is something that can fill it. In Heidegger’s perspective, boredom itself acquires meaning because, as long as it becomes truly profound, it effects a turn-around to another mode of being, another time – the Moment. As Beckett shows, the Moment is always indefinitely postponed. The Moment – the actual Meaning of life – only appears in a negative form, that of absence, and the small Moments (in love, art, intoxication) never last long. The problem, first and foremost, lies in accepting that the Moments which life dishes out are not only fleeting, but few and far between, and are thus interspersed by a great deal of boredom. For life does not consist of Moments but of time. The absence of the great Meaning does not, however, result in all meaning in life evaporating. A one-sided focusing on the absence of Meaning can overshadow all other meaning – and then the world really looks as if it has been reduced to rubble. A source of profound boredom is that we demand capital letters where we are obliged to make do with small ones. Even though no Meaning is given, there is meaning – and boredom. 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.


1 See Klapp, Overload and Boredom (Greenwood Press, New York 1986), chap. 10.
2 For a thorough account of various replacements for meaning, see Zapfe, Om det tragiske, chap. 6.
3 Cf. Joseph Brodsky, ‘In Praise of Boredom’, in On Grief and Reason (New York, 1995).
4 For a sophisticated discussion of the relationship between knowledge and interest, where admittedly the main emphasis is on more genera than personal interests, see Jürgen Habermas, Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), p. 14ff.
5 Martin Heidegger, Was heist Denken? (Tübingen, 1984), p. 2; Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen, 1990), p. 125.
6 See Seán Desmond Healy, Boredom, Self and Culture (London and Toronto, 1984), p. 24.
7 Karl Philipp Moritz, ‚Fragmente aus dem Tagebuch eines Geistersehers‘, in Werke (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), vol. III, p. 291. The theme of boredom also appears frequently in Moritz‘s literary works (especially in the novels Anton Reiser and Andreas Hartknopf), but, surprisingly, it is dealt with only to a lesser extent in his psychological studies.
8 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London, 1992), p. 86.
9 Ibid., pp. 88-9.
10 Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs by Baudelaire’, in Illuminations, pp. 155-6.
11 T. S. Eliot, ‘Choruses from “The Rock” (1934)’, in The Complete Works and Plays (London, 1987), p. 147.
12 It is also relevant here to include the linguistic philosophy of Ernst Jünger in ‚Der Arbeiter‘ (1932), in Sämtliche Werke, vol. VI (Stuttgart, 1960). He claimes that technology is the language of the present age - ‘a primitive language that is convincing by its mere existence’ (p. 177). In other words, it is a language that makes every hermeneutic dimension superfluous, for it has no meaning that has to be extracted via any interpretation.
13 Zapffe, Om det tragiske, p. 65.
14 Zapffe, ‘We make the metaphysical demand of life … that it be full to the brim with a meaning for everything that occurs, with everything there is of experiencing consciousness in us, which we experience as being inalienable and which constitute the specific nature of our being, our unique world-historical opportunity, our pride and nobility.’ (ibid., p. 100).
15 It must be underlined here that pre-modern societies are also characterized by a number of various forms of disfunctionality and that one ought to avoid considering them as something uniform and completely harmonious, but boredom and emptiness of meaning do not seem to be a great problem in such societies.
16 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), p. 112.
17 For an account that contradicts this, see Françoise Wemelsfelder, Animal Boredom: Towards an Empirical Approach of Animal Subjectivity (Leiden, 1993).
18 Nisbet, ‘Boredom’, p. 23.
19 It should be noted here that both the word and the phenomenon have a long prehistory. For an informative and relatively simple presentation, see Michael Allan Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche (Chicago, 1995). Jacobi’s letter is available in a number of editions, for example, in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, ‘Brief an Fichte’, in Werke, vol. III (Darmstadt, 1968).
20 Feodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed, vol. XI; or see Die Dämonen (Frankfurt am Main, 1986), p. 852.

01.01.2010