Deep Boredom: The Horror of our Age
A look at Network, Black Mirror and Kurt Cobain through Kant, Heidegger, Hegel
‘A State of Total Boredom’
§1 The Horror of The Age to Come
The old Kant calls boredom the horror vacui, the horror of inner void. ‘Boredom,’ he writes in the Anthropology, ‘is disgust with oneself.’ The self-referential subject has the perfect duty to itself to make sure no boredom ever occurs, for it is but disgust. Kant already appears to see the great boredom of late-modern man on the horizon that amounts but to disgust, a disgust that must be chased out, or, shall we say, that must be entertained.
The horror vacui is present in Kant’s philosophy because it is foundational for the age to come, for the horror vacui opens up the new age. In the prelude to the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel sees the rise of a new age indicated by a simultaneous occurrence of the phenomena of “boredom and carelessness.” Boredom emerges as Spirit falls out of itself with its having-become. Boredom emerges together with a certain silliness, an ironic cold distance to the world. Thus already Hegel implies boredom to be the mood of our age.
It was Nietzsche, who carried the burden of being the great destroyer, who thought of modern man as disgusted and bored-to-tears with himself. This man he called “the last man,” who ‘flattens the earth,’ indulges in nihilism and hedonism, and knows of no greater goals beyond himself. “The fundamental fact of human will, of its horror vacui”, Nietzsche argues in the Genealogy of Morality, is that it “needs a goal and it rather wills the Nought than not willing at all.” (KSA 5/411-412; my translation) One, if not the goal of this age is the instalment of a global management system: “Once we have that overall economic management of the earth, which is inevitably in store, humanity can find its best sense as a machinery at the service of this management: as an uncanny wheelwork of ever smaller, ever more finely “adapted” wheels.” (KSA 12/462 et seq., 10[17]; my translation) In this state the human being, Nietzsche argues elsewhere in the Nachlaß, will be very interested indeed. Albeit “only epidermally interested.” Put differently, always slightly bored, while always desiring to be entertained.
But is boredom not just an accidental mood we all have from time to time? How could it be the mood of an entire—our—age? Are we all, as it were, infected or affected by it? But surely we are not bored all the time, are we? How could anyone claim that boredom is the fundamental mood of an age?
§2 Deep Boredom
In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, a lecture course held in 1929/30 Heidegger asks: “Does it ultimately hold true for us that a profound boredom draws back and forth like a silent fog in the abysses of Dasein?” (GA29/30, 115)
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Halkyon to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.