Content area
Full text
Kierkegaard diagnoses modern boredom as both a social phenomenon and as an individual malaise. He focuses on a distinctive second-order form of boredom, "demonic boredom," in which the reflective aesthete affects boredom in order to overcome it through irony. Modern boredom is construed as an aesthetic and psychological problem, which consists in a lack of resources to make life "interesting." Its antidotes are taken to be distraction or the subjective injection of "the interesting." Kierkegaard argues that the modern conceptions of boredom and its antidotes are flawed, since they ignore the spiritual dimensions of acedia. Demonic boredom is a mood, rather than an emotion, and fails to seek its only real antidote in the passion of faith, which can be ignited through spiritual exercises, heartfelt concern for others, temporal reorientation of the self towards eternity, and through finding the "fullness of time" in the life of Christ.
The demonic is the vacuous, the boring ...
the vacuous, the boring signify in turn the self-enclosed
Vigilius Haufhiensis1
1. Boredom in Modernity
Boredom is not a universal feature of human life, but arises as a distinctive malady of modernity in epidemic proportions. This epidemic is accompanied by a burgeoning of discourse about boredom in the nineteenth century, which both mirrors the epidemic and helps to propagate it. The modern concept of boredom is distinct from the medieval concept of acedia in belonging to a different discourse, which is produced by different institutions; it is conceived as a psychological malady, a social malaise, or an aesthetic challenge, rather than as a sin; its antidotes are conceived as either distraction by means of "busyness" or by craving "the interesting," or as transfiguration of experience through intensification of the imagination, rather than as spiritual discipline, patient devotion or penance; and it is conceived in purely human, secular terms, rather than in religious terms.
As a widespread phenomenon, whose causes are rooted in profound social and economic changes, modern boredom seems closer to the ancient Roman taedium vitae than to acedia. Both ancient Romans and postindustrial Europeans suffered from changes to the temporal structure of experience, caused by urbanization and the artificial administration of time, which rendered the individual's sense of time empty and meaningless.2 The reaction in both cases...