Product Description

Although boredom is something that we have all suffered from at some point in our lives, and has become one of the central preoccupations of our age, very few of us can explain precisely what it is. In this book Lars Svendsen examines the nature of boredom, how it originated, its history, how and why it afflicts us, and why we cannot seem to overcome it by any act of will. A diverse and vague phenomenon, described as anything from 'tame longing without any particular object' (Schopenhauer), 'a bestial and indefinable affliction' (Dostoevsky), to 'time's invasion of your world system' (Joseph Brodsky), boredom allows many interpretations. In exploring these, Lars Svendsen brings together observations from philosophy, literature, psychology, theology and popular culture, examining boredom's pre-Romantic manifestations in medieval torpor, philosophies of the subject from Pascal to Nietzsche, and modern related concepts of alienation and transgression, taking in texts by Samuel Beckett, J. G. Ballard, Andy Warhol and many others. He also puts forward an ethics for boredom, discussing what stance one can adopt towards boredom as well as how one ought not to do so. This book arose from the author's attempt to relax and do nothing. Finding this impossible, he thought it better to do something, so he wrote A Philosophy of Boredom. A witty and entertaining account that considers a serious issue, it will appeal to anyone who has ever felt bored, and wanted to know why.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #151022 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

TLS
‘When an investigation into boredom is done well, as it is in A Philosophy of Boredom…, it is positively gripping'

About the Author
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Bergen, Norway. He is the author of many books including Man, Morals and Genes: A Critique of Biologism (2001) and The Philosophy of Evil (2001).

Customer Reviews

The fascination of boredom
A brief but gripping little treatise on boredom. Svendsen identifies two types of it: situational and existential boredom. The former is an emotion, experienced when you are doing something you find tedious, or are unable to find anything to do that interests you; the latter is a mood, verging on an affliction, something that happens to you when you can find no special value in life but don't feel that this is any great cause for actual depression. His cultural range is enormous, going from an obscure novel by a German Romantic to Iggy Pop (who's actually an American romantic, so maybe it's not as enormous as all that). In any case, Svendsen says that boredom is born of Romanticism and provides plenty of evidence to support his argument. I can't comment on how accurate the translation is, but it's certainly elegant; I love in the last sentence Svendsen's marvellously gloomy but casually beautiful description of boredom as "life's own gravity". Once again this publisher has brought out a small masterpiece of genuinely useful European philosophy (check out their "Encyclopaedia of Stupidity").

The destructive nature of modern boredom: coined as a word in 1760.
Svendson discusses the nature of modern boredom, which he distinguishes from the ancient 'Acedia', the forerunner of the modern concept of boredom: the word itself dates from 1760. `Boredom became widespread when traditional structures of meaning disappear.' He also distinguishes the concept from that of mere ennui or world weariness, although I would say that the ennui of the aristocrat who had been everywhere and done everything does resemble that of the modern shopped-out, travelled-out, consumer. However, there is more to it.
Svendsen ranges widely though the history of ideas, taking a phenomenological rather than psychological approach. The book offers both a good introduction to the subject, with plenty of useful references for readers who wish to go deeper, and an apportunity for rusty philosophers to reacquaint themselves with old friends. [I dug out Kierkegaard's Either/Or to read his discussion of boredom.]