Notes on Boredom and Metaphysics, sociologically framed

Martin Heidegger’s understanding of boredom in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics relates this phenomenon to the experience of time. In this peculiar experience the individual is found without outer references, alone with his feeling. The perplexity awakens with the possibility of nothingness, whose shade menaces every bit of existence’s certitude. Out of nowhere seems to grow in the affected individual the urge to drive it away. As a counterpoint to this very abstract apprehension of reality, some specific strategies are offered: efficient ‘pastimes’, seeking to avoid the negative side of boredom. Free-market economy delivers the society plenty of options that pretend to be meaningful thanks to the separation of working time and leisure time. The reference to philosophers committed to a cultural critique (from Ernst Bloch to Peter Sloterdijk) will enlighten the contemporary tendency to refuse boredom’s intriguing feeling of time, that suggests the presence of nothingness, anthropologically processed as death. In the end, the desperate search for comfort, well-being and fun can mask only partially the reach of that ontological fear.

KEYWORDS: Metaphysics, Boredom, Individual, Postmodernity, Leisure, Heidegger, Adorno, Nietzsche.