Kierkegaard's Demonic Boredom

Abstract

Kierkegaard diagnoses modem boredom as both a social phenomenon and as an individual malaise. He focuses on a distinctive second-order form of boredom, "demonic boredom," in which the reflective aesthete affects boredom in order to overcome it through irony. Modern boredom is construed as an aesthetic and psychological problem, which consists in a lack of resources to make life "interesting." Its antidotes are taken to be distraction or the subjective injection of "the interesting." Kierkegaard argues that the modern conceptions of boredom and its antidotes are flawed, since they ignore the spiritual dimensions of 'acedia'. Demonic boredom is a mood, rather than an emotion, and fails to seek its only real antidote in the passion of faith, which can be ignited through spiritual exercises, heartfelt concern for others, temporal reorientation of the self towards eternity, and through finding the "fullness of time" in the life of Christ.