right and left on campus today

A recent book by Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder, The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today, rings true to me and offers numerous original insights. It’s based on 200 hours of interviews with 77 student activists on four flagship state university campuses.

The progressive activists include liberals (who define liberalism as support for the Democratic Party) and leftists (who disparage liberalism). On campus, most find courses, professors, majors, and co-curricular opportunities–such as multicultural centers–that align with their views and interests. Progressive donors and foundations fund such opportunities by donating to the institutions, which remain in control of the students’ experiences. None of the leftist students have leftist parents, and often they have been radicalized by courses. This does not mean that professors brainwashed them; sometimes, rigorously presented material radicalizes people who choose to study it.

The progressive students are especially concerned about their own universities’ policies, whether regarding diversity, climate, or labor issues. They form close relationships with favored faculty and staff. However, many are frustrated when their institutions fail to change; and their faculty and staff mentors–who are employees with job descriptions and supervisors–cannot help them wholeheartedly. (In my experience, many employees are also torn between their personal political views and a professional ethic of neutrality.)

Progressive students who work with national or global organizations or networks provide free or cheap labor as “service”; some even raise money as canvassers. In short, they give more to national progressive efforts than they get back. Their activism rarely opens channels to post-college employment, and some even want to return to academia as staff or faculty.

The conservative activist students range ideologically from moderate institutionalists and intellectuals to MAGA radicals. However, they are fewer and they form more of a community on each campus than the progressives do. They express few complaints about university policies and are rarely interested in that topic. They are critical of campus culture, and they blame their fellow students more than the institution for perceived leftwing bias. In any case, they are mainly involved with national organizations and networks.

Conservative donors and foundations are leery about contributing to universities–or at least to their liberal arts, academic components–but eager to support conservative students directly with paid internships and other opportunities. Conservative students meet peers from other campuses at national gatherings and move readily into post-graduate jobs. They get more than they give from national organizations.

To the extent that conservative activists intervene on their own campuses, it is mostly by inviting speakers in the hope of influencing campus culture. For conservative national organizations that fund speakers, controversial visitors represent an attractive wedge issue. Although conservative students are deeply divided about the merits of the more controversial speakers, they are united about free speech. Besides, protests against conservative speakers attract national publicity that plays well on the right.

This sociological account explains more about politics on today’s campuses than a narrow focus on the universities’ own policies or an analysis of generational proclivities, such as an alleged turn away from liberal values. As always, most people behave according to incentives and norms–including radical people in radical organizations.

For me, the book raises complex normative questions (what should we want from higher education?) and policy questions. I hope to address those matters further in a review-article about this book and several other interesting recent works on higher education and politics.

See also what sustains free speech?; a civic approach to free speech

upcoming book talks

Tuesday, January 31 at 4 p.m: The Providence College Humanities Forum, in collaboration with “Conversations for Change” and The Frederick Douglass Project ; Ruane Center for the Humanities 105, Providence College, Providence RI

Friday, February 3 from 12:00pm to 1:30pm: Ohio State University COMPAS Colloquium (“What Should Civic Education Become in the 21st Century?”, panel with Angela M. Banks and Winston C. Thompson. Also online.

Monday, Feb 6: at Wake Forest University’s Program for Leadership and Character in Winston-Salem, NC

Plus a very enjoyable visit to a Harvard Design School seminar today, thanks to my friend Eric Gordon.


Frontiers of Democracy 2023: Religious Pluralism and Robust Democracy in Multiracial Societies

Frontiers of Democracy is an annual conference at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life that convenes practitioners and scholars for intensive discussions. In 2023, thanks to generous funding from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the special theme of the conference is religious pluralism and its relationship to democracy in multiracial societies. 

The speakers in plenary sessions will include Cornell William Brooks, Brandon Thomas Crowley, Diana Eck, Aminta Kilawan-Narine, Eric Liu, Cristina Moon, Simran Jeet Singh, Michael Wear, and others. 

The religious pluralism theme is not exclusive, and we welcome sessions on other topics related to Tisch College’s “North Star”: building robust, inclusive democracy for an increasingly multiracial society. While we will consider proposals for presentations or panels of presentations, we actively seek proposals for other formats, such as moderated discussions, meetings devoted to strategy or design, trainings and workshops, case study discussions, debates, and other creative formats. 

Time and location: July 13 (5-7 pm) to July 15 (noon) on Tufts University’s Medford, MA campus near the Medford/Tufts Station on the Boston Green Line.

Cost: $240 for a standard ticket with discounts for current students. This includes hors d’oeuvres on July 13, breakfast and lunch on July 14, and breakfast and lunch on July 15. Other meals and lodgings are not provided.

Podcast on What Should We Do?

APSA’s Civic Engagement Section has a podcast, Civic Cafe, that’s organized and introduced by University of Virginia political scientist Carah Ong Whaley. Episode 2, “What Should We Do?”, is an interview of me by my friend David Campbell, the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame. Dave’s most recent book (with Geoff Layman and John Green) is Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics, which received the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Here is a link to listen to the episode. (I think a video version is coming to YouTube, and I will include a link once that’s up.) Civic Cafe also provides links to relevant websites , namely: APSA Civic Engagement Section; Guided activities that build civic skills and capacity; Civic Studies at Tufts University; Common Cause; and Educating for American Democracy

Institute of Civic Studies and Learning for Democracy

(I will not be able to attend this whole event because of my teaching responsibilities at Tufts, but I will help with planning it and certainly endorse it.)

Call for Applications

We are happy to invite applications for the Institute of Civic Studies and Learning for Democracy (ICSLD) that will take place at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia (USA), from September 3–10, 2023. The ICSLD is organized by a team from University of Augsburg, Germany (Tetyana Hoggan-Kloubert), North Carolina State University (Chad Hoggan), and the Madison Center for Civic Engagement at James Madison University (David Kirkpatrick, Kara Dillard), with support from Tufts University (Peter Levine) and University of Maryland (Karol Soltan).

http://www.CivicReconstructionProject.org/ICSLD.html

Objectives and Topics

The Institute of Civic Studies and Learning for Democracy is an intensive, 8-day, seminar and residential retreat—bringing together an international group of practitioners, graduate students, and scholars from diverse professions and fields of study. Participants will be staying in the same hotel and participating in workshops, planning sessions, and social events all day and evening throughout the nine days. Costs for hotel and meals are covered by ICSLD.

The ICSLD deals with issues related to the development of civic society, the role of the individual/citizen in society, the role of education in promoting democracy, the role of institutions in the development of a civic society, and questions related to the ethical foundation of civic issues in a democratic society. These topics will be examined in international and comparative perspectives.

The ICSLD engages participants in challenging discussions such as:

  • What kinds of citizens do democracies need?
  • What do citizens need to know and be able to do in order to participate effectively in democratic society?
  • What practices and institutional structures promote effective adult civic learning?
  • What ought to be the relationships among empirical evidence, ethics, and strategy?
  • How can we learn from influential theorists and practitioners at important turning points in history?

The Institute of Civic Studies and Learning for Democracy is a continuation of the Summer Institute of Civic Studies, which was organized annually by Peter Levine, Karol Soltan, and Tetyana Hoggan-Kloubert from 2015-2019 (and at Tufts University 2009- 2018).

How to apply

All application materials must be submitted in English. The application must include the following:

  • A cover letter telling us why you want to participate in the ICSLD and how the seminar will help you promote civic capacities and engagement in the area in which you live (currently or in the future) (maximum 2 pages)
  • A curriculum vitae or resumé

All application materials should be sent as an email attachment in .DOC or .PDF format to tetyana.kloubert@uni-a.de. The total number of participants will be limited to 20. We will consider applications from any country. We are interested in applicants who have a long-term interest in developing the civic potential in their respective countries. Participants will be asked to attend two brief online meetings prior to the ICSLD and to prepare by reading provided texts in advance of the Institute.

The working language of the ICSLD will be English. Your mastery of the English language must be sufficient to read and understand complex texts from multiple disciplines, and to take part in lively discussions.

Deadline For best consideration apply by March 15. Decisions will be announced late April.

Expenditures Participants will be provided with lodging, meals, and full event access. Participants will be responsible for their own travel costs. We are seeking additional funding to contribute towards travel costs. If those funds become available, we will inform applicable participants.

Contact For more information about the Institute of Civic Studies and Learning for Democracy, please contact tetyana.kloubert@uni-a.de. We encourage you to share this message with your networks of people who might be interested in attending.

the sociology of the analytic/continental divide in philosophy

I agree with William Blattner that “the so-called Continental-analytic division within philosophy is not a philosophical distinction; it’s a sociological one. It is the product of historical accident.”

The Continental and analytic schools each encompass too much diversity and overlap too much to allow them to be distinguished on the basis of doctrines or methods. Rather, they are two social groupings whose behavior can be illuminated by thinking about group-dynamics, incentives, and structures that may apply in other such conflicts.

In other words, we can put aside the content of the philosophical discussion and view analytic and continental philosophers as analogous to other examples of rival groups that display similar behavior, such as the Jacobins and Girondins during the French Revolution (minus guillotines), Weimar Classicists vs. Jena Romantics around 1800, or perhaps mods and rockers in British youth culture around 1960.

Here are the features I would note. Professional philosophy is a community that controls who can belong, and memberships (college teaching jobs) are scarce and desired by a larger population than can be accommodated. The community is decentralized, without a single authority; decisions about membership are made by local clusters (departments). However, the prevailing culture is hierarchical and status-conscious, and participants value reputation highly–fame is more salient than money. A small proportion of members have reputations across the community, but most are not widely known.

Within the whole community, two larger groups formed in the later 1900s and persisted for many decades: the analytics and the Continentals. They never encompassed all philosophers. There were also smaller self-conscious groups (American pragmatists, Thomists, specialists in classical and Asian philosophy, Marxists) and many individuals who refused to identify with a group at all. But some philosophers were committed to the analytic-Continental distinction and invested effort in debating, shifting, and maintaining the boundaries of their own group and expanding its influence.

Individuals may hold principled reasons to identify with one of these groups or the other, or not to participate in the distinction at all. They also have incentives to align or not align and to publicize or obfuscate their own stances. Such incentives vary. Is there an opportunity to get a job in a department that is overwhelmingly analytic? Is that department looking to reinforce that tilt or to diversify? Some philosophers may want to avoid such careerist considerations, but natural selection will weed out many of the purists.

A situation like this encourages people to treat some individuals as shibboleths. Perhaps a controversial person is influential–although not universally admired–within Group A. Most people in Group B cannot believe that this person has any admirers at all. Not only do they make tolerance for the person a defining characteristic of Group A, but they attribute aspects of his beliefs and behaviors to everyone in Group A.

Perhaps Robespierre is an example, polarizing Jacobins and Girondins even though many Jacobins hated him, and even though it is hard to identify sharp conceptual differences between these groups’ ideologies.

I think Blattner is right to attribute this role to Heidegger in the analytic-Continental divide. Although many Continental philosophers dislike Heidegger on numerous grounds (not only his Nazi phase), most would acknowledge that he belongs in the curriculum, that he inspired valuable work by others, and that one should know his work. For many analytics, he is a willful obscurantist, and they tend to attribute various aspects of his writing (an extremely self-conscious style, lots of hard-to-define neologisms, close readings of Romantic lyric poetry, an idealist history of thought) to Continental philosophy in general.

I am not sure which specific author to mention as a shibboleth on the analytic side, but it would be someone who dismisses historical philosophy and insights from the humanities in favor of only the latest natural science and logic and who denies being influenced by his (sic) social, cultural, and class position. Maybe A.J. Ayer?

Philosophy is usually under external pressure–since Socrates–and it now faces declining enrollments and doubts about its economic value. (See “the ROI for philosophy“.) External pressure could unify the discipline, and maybe it is doing so to some extent. But it can also fuel the fires of internal division, as when royalist invasions of France provoked Jacobins and Girondins to turn on each other as traitors.

There have been many examples of fruitful interaction at the level of individuals or even between groups. But the analytic-Continental conflict persisted for so long that plenty of people carry lists of grudges. “Yale Riot Protests Tenure Denial” said the headline after Richard J. Bernstein was denied tenure at Yale–in 1965–and that episode lingered when I majored in the same department two decades later.

Affective polarization within the discipline is a Bad Thing, because it discourages learning, promotes stereotyping, and discriminates against heterodox approaches. But I don’t think it is unusual or inexplicable. In philosophy, the problem may already be improving. To the extent it persists, we should think about group-dynamics and instutional incentives more than actual philosophical differences.

apply to the Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER)

APSA’s Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER) is a four-day, residential institute that provides political scientists with training to conduct ethical and rigorous civically engaged research. Up to 20 scholars will be selected as ICER Fellows and invited to attend the 2023 Summer Institute. ICER Fellows will network with other like-minded political scientists, and together, learn best practices for conducting academically robust, mutually beneficial scholarship in collaboration with communities, organizations, and agencies outside of academia.

ICER is organized in partnership with Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life. The 2023 Institute will be held in person at Tufts University, outside of Boston, MA, from July 10-13.

The Institute will take place on campus at Tufts University from July 10-13. Approximately twenty fellows will meet each day for intensive discussions and workshops. Thanks to support from the Ivywood Foundation, participation in the Institute for Civically Engaged Research is free, housing on the Tufts campus or a stipend to partially offset the cost of a hotel stay will be provided, and scholarships are available to defray costs of meals and travel. Applicants are expected to seek financial support from their home institution, but admission to the Institute will not be affected by financial need.

To apply, please complete this form. Application deadline: March 31, 2023.

Note: The Institute will operate according to the recommendations and requirements of federal and local public health authorities. We plan for the Institute to be held in person at Tufts University but reserve the right to change these plans as the public health situation warrants.

Learn more here.

my own trust in institutions

Gallup has asked representative samples of Americans about their trust in various institutions since the 1970s. For instance, the proportion who expressed a great deal of trust in the medical system fell from 44% in 1975 to 14% in 1993 (recovering to 20% during the pandemic year of 2020, only to return to 15% last year). Between 18% and 31% say that they have a great deal of trust in the police each year, without a clear trend over time. Lately, only 11% express a great deal of trust in the Supreme Court, and that record-low rating has been widely noted.

My own levels of trust reflect my life experiences–which have been privileged and comfortable–plus my best efforts at understanding institutions more objectively. For what it’s worth, this is how I tend to think about them …

In affluent societies with economic and political competition, major institutions basically work as advertised. They do what they are widely described as doing, which is generally to serve people who can afford to pay. For instance, the health system dispenses effective treatments, banks protect depositors and deliver returns for shareholders, schools prepare most students for basic participation in the economy and society, and oil companies pump carbon to be burned.

If you believe that these institutions are scams or run by fools, you are naive and you will make yourself a mark for con artists. Or you may simply miss opportunities, e.g., by putting your money under the mattress instead of earning interest in a bank, by not getting vaccinated, or by failing to attend school.

On the other hand, these institutions are not designed to do very important things, such as preserve the environment, generate full employment, serve people in high need, or empower marginalized communities. So the problem is our array of institutions and their missions, not their basic reliability.

Truly predatory schemes occur. David A. Fahrenthold and my former student Talmon Joseph Smith report that restaurant workers are often required to “pay around $15 to a company called ServSafe for an online class in food safety,” and their money helps to “fund a nationwide lobbying campaign to keep their own wages from increasing.” This is deeply unjust. It is consistent, however, with my basic premise that our institutions serve their explicit constituencies as they advertise. The restaurant business offers competitively-priced food and profits for its investors; it is not set up to protect its own workers or the earth.

Institutions sometimes claim benefits that they clearly fail to offer. For instance, Royal Dutch-Shell claims to be committed to carbon-neutrality while actually boosting its capacity to pump oil, which harms affluent people along with everyone else. Such examples indicate that institutions lie outright, even to advantaged constituencies. However, I never believed that oil companies help the environment, nor are they widely described as doing so. Institutions tend to do what serious sources, such as major newspapers, say that they do.

By the way, the reason that individuals continue to invest in Shell is that they view the financial returns for themselves as more important than their share of the harms of global warming. It is not that individual investors have been fooled by “greenwashing” propaganda. (Institutional investors, such as pension funds, offer an opening because their members may rank protecting the earth as more important.)

My stance poses a circularity problem. I generally believe what I read in The New York Times but not propaganda from oil companies or social media from QAnon. I use words like “serious” and “mainstream,” as in “Mainstream media describe oil companies as contributors to dangerous global warming.” However, not all of us regard the same sources as mainstream. There is no View from Nowhere that sorts out the reliable from the unreliable. The view I am disclosing here is a form of ideology, in the sense of an overall orientation to the social world. It is subject to counter-examples, and I should be open to dropping it entirely. But the only alternative is to adopt a different overall orientation, and this one seems to me to fit the facts pretty well.

See also: vaccination, masking, political polarization, and the authority of science; mixed thoughts about the status of science; confidence in local institutions–new data; judgment in a world of power and institutions: outline of a view; we should be debating the big social and political paradigms; etc.

MacNeice on other people

Canto xvii of Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journey (1939) opens with luxurious experiences, such as watching a morning scene over breakfast and lying in a bath “under / Ascending scrolls of steam,” feeling “the ego merge as the pores open … And the body purrs like a cat.” He writes these passages in the first person plural, and it’s not clear whether he’s alone or with someone at the breakfast table and in the bath. In any case, these moments end; we must leave them. It is a mistake to pursue “the luxury life.”

And Plato was right to define the bodily pleasures 
As the pouring water into a hungry sieve* 
But wrong to ignore the rhythm which the intercrossing
Coloured waters permanently give. 

And Aristotle was right to posit the Alter Ego**
But wrong to make it only a halfway house: 
Who could expect – or want – to be spiritually self-supporting, 
Eternal self-abuse?

Why not admit that other people are always 
Organic to the self, that a monologue 
Is the death of language and that a single lion 
Is less himself, or alive, than a dog and another dog?

Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal: A Poem (1939), Faber & Faber, Kindle Edition. 

*referring to Plato, Gorgias 493c (Lamb trans.): “and the soul of the thoughtless he likened to a sieve, as being perforated, since it is unable to hold anything by reason of its unbelief and forgetfulness.” Socrates continues: this metaphor “is bordering pretty well on the absurd; but still it sets forth what I wish to impress upon you, if I somehow can, in order to induce you to make a change, and instead of a life of insatiate licentiousness to choose an orderly one that is set up and contented with what it happens to have got.”

**Aristotle, Nic. Eth. 1169b (Rackham trans.) “People say that the supremely happy are self-sufficing, and so have no need of friends: for they have the good things of life already, and therefore, being complete in themselves, require nothing further; whereas the function of a friend, who is a second self, is to supply things we cannot procure for ourselves.”

See also: the sublime and other people; the sublime is social–with notes on Wordsworth’s Lines Above Tintern Abbey.

joys and limitations of phenomenology

Very close descriptions of human experience can move us by provoking empathy for the person who offers the account and by reminding us of the complexity and richness of our own inner lives.

We are evolved animals, composed of things like cells and liquids and electrical charges, yet some of our experiences seem elusive and mysterious. I am thinking of phenomena like the passage of time, an awareness of another’s thought, or a free-seeming choice. Maybe it’s only due to our cognitive limitations that these experiences appear complex; another kind of creature could easily analyze and describe our condition.* Yet our halting efforts at self-understanding make the world seem elusive and mysterious.

My dog knows things I cannot, like the significance of the smells on all the tree trunks on our block. But he also has tangible experiences that point beyond his ken. For instance, that tag that jingles under his neck says the name of our town, which is why he is allowed to play off-leash in the local park; and our town’s authority derives from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He is not wired to be able to understand much of that. In similar ways, when we investigate phenomena like our own consciousness and choice (no matter how skillfully and effectively), we are exploring the edges of things that we are not well designed to comprehend. I find this difficulty and mystery consoling. It helps to re-enchant the inner life.

It is one gift of certain fictional and poetic texts. Lately, I have also enjoyed works by the classic phenomenologists Husserl and Heidegger. Yet I am worried about two methodological limitations (which must be already discussed at length in secondary literature): social biases and the influence of socially constructed vocabulary.

For instance, Heidegger offers an 89-page-long analysis of boredom, presenting it as a door to fundamental truths about time and being and an opportunity to discover one’s existential freedom (Heidegger 1930/1995 §19-38; discussed by Slaby 2010).

(Yes, the idea of voluntarily reading many pages by Heidegger--about boredom!–invites parody, but the material is actually quite interesting.)

Heidegger builds his account on three successively “profound” examples of boredom. In the first, the narrator is bored while waiting for a train “in the tasteless station of some lonely minor railway.” Time, which is usually invisible, painfully drags. In the second, the narrator experiences a perfectly pleasant social evening, during which time passes normally. “We come home quite satisfied. We cast a quick glance at the work we interrupted that evening, make a rough assessment of things and look ahead to the next day—and then it comes: I was bored after all on this evening.” Here time does not perceptively drag, yet there is a retrospective appraisal that time was lost and wasted, which hints at insights about the person’s whole life. Third, one makes a judgment without actually going through the experience at all, as in the general statement: “‘it is boring for one’ to walk through the streets of a large city on a Sunday afternoon.” Close inspection of these examples poses the question “Has man in the end become boring to himself?” (Heidegger 1930/1995, §23a, §24b, §30).

Heidegger writes about the boring railway station in the first-person plural: “We are sitting [“Wir sitzen] … We look at the clock—only a quarter hour has gone by” (Heidegger 1930/1995 §23a, emphasis added). The grammar seems inclusive; the reader is expected to be part of the “we.” In fact, the test of the validity of a phenomenological analysis is whether it feels familiar.

However, the writer happens to be an increasingly famous philosophy professor whose experiences will become more engaging soon after the train ride is over. In short, he is privileged. His bias emerges in passages like this:

Is not every station boring, even though trains constantly arrive and depart and crowds of people throng? Perhaps it is not only all stations that are boring for us. Perhaps, even though trains constantly enter and leave, bringing people with them, there is still a peculiar sense of something more in these stations which anyone who passes tenement blocks in large cities has experienced. One could say that, while it may be like this for us, some peasant from the Black Forest will take enormous pleasure in it, and therefore boredom is a matter of taste

(Heidegger 1930/1995 §23d).

Evidently, neither the reader nor the author lives in a tenement house or identifies as a peasant.

Compare a type of experience that is prominent in early 20th century modernist literature by women (of whom Virginia Woolf is the most famous). Here, boredom “can appear as emptiness or deadness, a lack, or simply passive dissatisfaction.” In this feminist literature, the word “is used, sometimes interchangeably, with a number of other terms defining psychic, spiritual, moral, and physical states in which the self has difficulty accessing authenticity, productivity, and desire—all qualities attributed to one’s success as an individual” (Pease 2021, vii).

This kind of boredom involves long periods of time (months or years) in which not enough of perceived value occurs to make the individual feel satisfied with life. The hours may be filled with specific activities and events that make time pass so that it is not unpleasant or perceived to drag, but boredom is the subject’s appraisal of a whole period of life. It’s like never being able to leave Heidegger’s dinner party (which is not a problem that he encounters).

Since academic research is, almost by definition, conducted by people who hold currently bourgeois roles–albeit often precarious ones–it is crucial not to let first-person phenomenology supplant literary criticism and social science. Researchers and professors need to learn what an experience feels like to other kinds of people.

The other problem involves language. Phenomenology typically connects an inner experience to a word or phrase that names it. The word in question may have a history of being used in diverse ways. A feeling, such as boredom, that we experience as immediate and direct is socially constructed insofar as it has a name with well-known implications (Goodstein 2005, 4). Therefore, changes in the meaning of words may affect our experiences.

Classic phenomenologists sometimes tried to avoid the ambiguous and inconsistent connotations of existing words by coining new ones, which is one source of the difficulty of their texts. But one cannot write with neologisms alone. We need phenomenological accounts of widely used words, in order to reason about how best to use those words.

Heidegger emphasizes the literal root of the German word for boredom, Langeweile, or “long-while” (Heidegger 1930/1995, §19). This etymology will not influence an English-speaker who reflects on being “bored” or a French speaker who experiences ennui. The French word may suggest a degree of superiority, since it comes from the Latin odio, to hate, as in Horace’s famous “Odi profanum vulgus et arceo” (“I hate and shun the vulgar crowd”).

It is difficult to reconstruct the experience of boredom before the English word emerged (only ca. 1750), but it must have been different from today’s experience, if only because in those days it was unnamed and lacked conventional moral connotations. Today, a child who is taught that it is bad to be bored may experience boredom with guilt, resentment, or both.

Goodstein argues that “modern boredom” has loose connections with older ideas, such as melancholy and acedia (spiritual apathy), but “it can be identified with none of them. … Each of these forms of discontent is embedded in an historically and culturally specific way of understanding human experience—in which I call a rhetoric of reflection.” For instance, the pre-modern word “melancholy” assumed that humors could get out of balance: a disease model. Acedia implied that the sinner had become estranged from God. Modern boredom—“the experience without qualities”—is “the plague of the enlightened subject, whose skeptical distance from the certainties of faith, tradition, sensation renders the immediacy of quotidian meaning hollow or inaccessible.” Individuals suffering from modern boredom are out of harmony with society and alienated from their “own doing and being” (Goodstein 2005, 4, 10). Modern people who see themselves as bored are liable to be conscious of their individuality and alienation. They might perceive others as also bored: that is a common experience in school. Even so, all those individual students are alienated from the institution.

In short, Heidegger’s “we” is limited by both his social position and historical period. He has an idiosyncratic and not very empirical understanding of history, and virtually no awareness of his limited social perspective.

Like other works of phenomenology, Heidegger’s account can move us and inform us by resonating with our own experiences, but we must be careful to not to attend only to people who resemble ourselves.


*Heidegger explicitly disagrees that the “particular difficulties” of understanding Being are “grounded in any shortcomings of the cognitive powers with which we are endowed, or in the lack of a suitable way of conceiving—a lack which seemingly would not be hard to remedy” (Being and Time, H.16, Maquarrie & Robinson trans.). But he dismisses the validity of scientific research on human beings, and I think that’s a mistake.

Sources: Heidegger, M. 1930/1995.The fundamental concepts of metaphysics: world, finitude, solitude, trans. W. McNeil & N. Walker. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995 Heidegger. 1930/1983. I also consulted some passages in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit, in Gesamtausgabe (collected works) 1923-1944, vol 29/30, Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983. Also: Goodstein, E. S. 2005. Experience without qualities: boredom and modernity.  Stanford University Press; Pease, A. 2012. Modernism, feminism and the culture of boredom. Cambridge University Press; and Slaby, J. 2010. The other side of existence: Heidegger on boredom, in Jan Söffner, Sabine Flach, eds, Habitus in habitat II: other sides of cognition. Bern: Peter Lang, 101-120. See also: introspect to reenchant the inner life; nature includes our inner lives; and a Husserlian meditation.