Besuch vom Mittagsdamon: Philosophie der Langeweile

Abstract

Decher, Friedhelm. Besuch vom Mittagsdamon: Philosophie der Langeweile. Luneburg: Klampen, 2000.257pp. euro14.00 paperback. Wenig Dinge werden so oft genannt, ohne wirklich gekannt zu sein, als die Langeweile, remarks an unnamed writer in 1854. What was true then-boredom the highly familiar yet unexamined phenomenon-is by and large still true today. Its marginal research status notwithstanding, there is by now, though often gone unnoticed, a sizable and multi-disciplinary body of scholarship on this elusive entity. While Enlightenment's mainstream therapeutic discourse on boredom as a univocal psychic disorder of lack continues to be influential, several studies of the last three decades have begun to question its anthropological assumption and developed alternative conceptualizations, such as boredom as a complex and ambivalent state of mind, a historical phenomenon, a cultural construct of modernity, a mode of social interaction and communication, an integral part of the bourgeois ideology of the (male) subject, and a polysemous aesthetic signifier. As a result, boredom has emerged as a theoretical problem, while the practical hope to cure it has waned. What better time for philosophy then to commence the examining work, its Arbeit am Begriff. However, contemporary academic philosophy has rarely taken up the challenge, and the present monograph is, alas, no exception. Whereas its main title, an allusion to both the Biblical trope of the demon of noontide and R. Kuhn's seminal literary history of ennui, conjures up the dreadfulness of the topic, the easy chair image on the jacket betrays its cozy modus operandi: philosophy of boredom as usual. Methodologically, Decher's philosophy amounts to little more than a hermeneutics of ideas which, save for a gloss on the premodern acedia tradition, covers European thought on boredom from the late seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Equally traditional is the inquiry's theoretical framework, as outlined in the first chapter. Along the theory/practice division, it sets out to explore two principal questions. First, Was ist, in der Begrifflichkeit der philosophischen Tradition des Abendlandes gesprochen, das 'Wesen' der Langeweile? (19), and second, what are the remedies for boredom, and is there a cure for it? In this dual approach, as well as the study's organizing trope of illness, Decher unwittingly follows the Enlightenment heritage for which understanding boredom has primarily been a therapeutic issue. Moreover, what appears to be a recognition of the postmodern critique of essentialist thought, turns out to be a mere typographical concession. That boredom might not have a fixed and homogeneous essence, a point of debate in scholarship, is not an issue for this philosopher. The essentialist presumption is linked to the other fundamental premise that boredom is a transhistorical, universal affliction. Even though this position has been a bone of contention, the author is satisfied with anecdotal evidence, abstaining from any serious debate. Taking his cues from the introspective descriptions the Enlightenment engendered, Decher isolates the phenomenological nature of boredom in familiar terms: a negative feeling of psychic emptiness, a sense of nothing, and a paralysis of vitality. But that is not the ultimate essence of boredom. An existential interpretation, Heideggerian avant la lettre and in circulation since the Romantic trope of world ennui, brings it to the fore: boredom reveals the pure Faktizitat (19) of Dasein and nothingness as a conditio humana. Let alone that this definition is too broad, a similar claim could be made about anxiety or depression, so what exactly is said here? Maybe nothing disguised as profundity. Perhaps that human life as such has no all-encompassing, a priori meaning. Possibly, that boredom marks a boundary between intelligibility and nonintelligibility or, in traditional terminology, between culture and nature. …