philosophy of boredom

This article is in production and should appear soon: Levine P (2023) Boredom at the border of philosophy: conceptual and ethical issues. Frontiers of Sociology 8:1178053. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2023.1178053.

(And yes, I anticipate and appreciate jokes about writing yet another boring article–this time, about boredom.)

Abstract:

Boredom is a topic in philosophy. Philosophers have offered close descriptions of the experience of boredom that should inform measurement and analysis of empirical results. Notable historical authors include Seneca, Martin Heidegger, and Theodor Adorno; current philosophers have also contributed to the literature. Philosophical accounts differ in significant ways, because each theory of boredom is embedded in a broader understanding of institutions, ethics, and social justice. Empirical research and interventions to combat boredom should be conscious of those frameworks. Philosophy can also inform responses to normative questions, such as whether and when boredom is bad and whether the solution to boredom should involve changing the institutions that are perceived as boring, the ways that these institutions present themselves, or individuals’ attitudes and choices.

An excerpt:

It is worth asking whether boredom is intrinsically undesirable or wrong, not merely linked to bad outcomes (or good ones, such as realizing that one’s current activity is meaningless). One reason to ask this question is existential: we should investigate how to live well as individuals. Are we obliged not to be bored? Another reason is more pragmatic. If being bored is wrong, we might look for effective ways to express that fact, which might influence people’s behaviors. For instance, children are often scolded for being bored. If being bored is not wrong, then we shouldn’t—and probably cannot—change behavior by telling people that it’s wrong to be bored. Relatedly, when is it a valid critique of an organization or institution to claim that it causes boredom or is boring? Might it be necessary and appropriate for some institutions … to be boring?

I have not done my own original work on this topic. I wrote this piece because I was asked to. I tried to review the literature, and a peer reviewer helped me improve that overview substantially.

I especially appreciate extensive and persuasive work by Andreas Elpidorou. He strikes me as an example of a positive trend in recent academic philosophy, also exemplified by Amia Srinivasan and others of their generation. These younger philosophers (whom I do not know personally) address important and thorny questions, such as whether and when it’s OK to be bored and whether one has a right to sex under various circumstances. They are deeply immersed in relevant social science. They also read widely in literature and philosophy and find insights in unexpected places. Srinivasan likes nineteenth-century utopian socialists and feminists; Elpidorou is an analytical philosopher who can also offer insightful close readings of Heidegger.

Maybe it was a bias on my part–or the result of being taught by specific professors–but I didn’t believe that these combinations were possible while I pursued my BA and doctorate in philosophy. In those days, analytical moral and political philosophers paid some attention to macroeconomic theory but otherwise tended not to notice current social science. Certainly, they didn’t address details of measurement and method, as Elpidorou does. Continental moral and political philosophers wrote about the past, but they understood history very abstractly, and their main sources were canonical classics. Most philosophers addressed either the design of overall political and economic systems or else individual dilemmas, such as whether to have an abortion (or which people to kill with an out-of-control trolley).

To me, important issues almost always combine complex and unresolved empirical questions with several–often conflicting–normative principles. Specific problems cannot be abstracted from other issues, both individual and social. Causes and consequences vary, depending on circumstances and chance; they don’t follow universal laws.

My interest in the empirical aspects of certain topics, such as civic education and campaign finance, gradually drew me from philosophy into political science. I am now a full professor of the latter discipline, also regularly involved with the American Political Science Association. However, my original training often reminds me that normative and conceptual issues are relevant and that positivist social science cannot stand alone.

Perhaps the main lesson you learn by studying philosophy is that it’s possible to offer rigorous answers to normative questions (such as whether an individual or an institution should change when the person is bored), and not merely to express opinions about these matters. I don’t have exciting answers of my own to specific questions about boredom, but I have reviewed current philosophers who do.

Learning to be a social scientist means not only gaining proficiency with the kinds of methods and techniques that can be described in textbooks, but also knowing how to pitch a proposed study so that it attracts funding, how to navigate a specific IRB board, how to find collaborators and share work and credit with them, and what currently interests relevant specialists. These highly practical skills are essential but hard to learn in a classroom.

If I could convey advice to my 20-year-old self, I might suggest switching to political science in order to gain a more systematic and rigorous training in the empirical methods and practical know-how that I have learned–incompletely and slowly–during decades on the job. But if I were 20 now, I might stick with philosophy, seeing that it is again possible to combine normative analysis, empirical research, and insights from diverse historical sources to address a wide range of vital human problems.

See also: analytical moral philosophy as a way of life; six types of claim: descriptive, causal, conceptual, classificatory, interpretive, and normative; is all truth scientific truth? etc.

Gillray and Blake

During the “Age of Revolution,” London was a hub of rapid technological, aesthetic, and economic change in the marketplace for political communications, foreshadowing our current experiences with digital media and propaganda.

James Gillray has been called the father of the political cartoon. As Clare Bucknell notes, he and William Blake, the visionary Romantic artist and poet, studied academic drawing and painting at the Royal Academy Schools in Somerset House around 1778. Later, Blake demonstrably borrowed from specific prints by Gillray (Marcus Wood, 1990). They were both part of the same London scene of artistic and technical experimentation, mass publishing, and political debate and censorship that Esther Chadwick, among others, explores. Their similarities and differences are interesting to trace.

The first illustration with this post offers a taste of Gillray. With the French Revolution at full tilt and a rebellion brewing in Ireland, the Prime Minister, William Pitt, called up the militia. The leader of the opposition, Charles James Fox, accused Pitt of stoking fear to confuse and oppress the people. Gillray depicts Pitt atop a coastal fort, clinging to the personification of England, John Bull, who is depicted as a yokel with symbols of both the French Revolution and the British monarchy attached to his hat.

James Gillray, John Bull bother’d:-or-the geese alarming the Capitol (1792) Copyright British Museum. Creative Commons

Watching geese through binoculars, Pitt cries, “There, John! – there! there they are! – I see them – get your Arms ready, John! – they’re Rising & coming upon us from all parts.” He claims he sees French revolutionary mobs, “the Scotch [who] have caught the Itch too; and the Wild-Irish have begun to pull off their Breeches!” He issues panicked orders to address the crisis: “down with the Book-stalls! – blow up the Gin-shops! – cut off the Printers Ears!”

John Bull answers, “Wounds, Measter, you frighten a poor honest simple Fellow out of his wits! – Gin-Shops & Printers-Ears! – & Bloody-Clubs & Lord Mayors! – and Wild-Irishmen without Breeches, & Sans-Culottes! Lord have mercy upon our Wives & Daughters! – And yet, I’ll be shot, if I can see any thing myself, but a few Geese, gabbling together – But Lord help my silly head, how should, such a Clod-pole as I, be able to see any thing Right?”

The gabbling geese might be a metaphor for the “public sphere” of political debate, treated as powerless. This is a satire of conservative nationalism and propaganda, by an artist who was equally adept at mocking radical ideas–and who accepted money to design cartoons for and against both parties at various times.

And here is an image by Blake from just about the same moment.

William Blake, Plate from Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), depicting Nebuchadnezzar, via Wikimedia Commons

The Devil has just said, “I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.” The text in the image reads, “When he had so spoken, I beheld the Angel, who stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire, and he was consumed, and arose as Elijah.”

Blake appends a “Note.—This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend; we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world shall have if they behave well. I have also the Bible of Hell, which the world shall have whether they will or no. One law for the lion and ox is Oppression.” The next section is entitled “A SONG OF LIBERTY” and offers numbered points, beginning:

  1. The Eternal Female groan’d; it was heard over all the earth:
  2. Albion’s coast is sick silent; the American meadows faint.
  3. Shadows of prophecy shiver along by the lakes and the rivers, and mutter across the ocean. France, rend down thy dungeon!

It’s likely that Blake really did experience a devil as his particular friend and read the Bible with him; mystical experiences influenced him as strongly as partisan cash motivated GIilray. Here Blake sings the very song that terrifies Pitt, the song of radical liberation.

Both Gillray and Blake incorporate their own handwritten text into their etchings or engravings. In both cases, the dialogue is fevered, histrionic. Neither has patience for the stuffed shirts of their day or any allegiance to “rules,” whether artistic, social, or sexual.

(Supposedly, Gillray and his business and personal partner, Hannah Humphrey, were on their way to church to be married when he remarked, “This is a foolish affair, methinks, Miss Humphrey. We live very comfortably together; we had better let well alone.” Blake and his spouse were once found stark naked in their garden, doing a dramatic reading of Paradise Lost.)

Those are similarities, but Blake was intensely earnest, whereas Gillray seems to have been a manic cynic (unless he was a canny subversive). I’d love to know what they said to each other when they were studying drawing and history-painting under Sir Joshua Reynolds.

See also: the role of communications in the French Revolution

Statistics

(Apologies to Wislawa Szymborska)

Attentive to all in a conversation:
Ten percent of the population. 
Someone's shame provokes a laugh:
Often true for over half. 
Ready and willing to reconcile:
Rare below the top quintile. 
Twenty percent, plus-or-minus three:
Those who’ll let an eccentric be. 
Almost three out of every four
Are quick to pity the sick or poor,
But doing something to counter hate: 
No more than one in any eight. 
Scoring high on all these measures:
We've found no such human treasures.
Of compassion, pure examples?
One or two in all our samples. 
But needing someone’s forgiving love:
Ninety-nine percent thereof.

See also: Cuttings: A book about happiness