From Anxiety to Boredom: Heidegger, Freud, and the Emotional History of Secularization

While anxiety has been chiefly researched in the field of psychopathology, the phenomenon of boredom has been explored more extensively by positive and existential psychologists, behaviorists, literary critics and historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers. This disciplinary separation is both an expression of the difference between anxiety and boredom and a hindrance to the systematic study of this difference. This dissertation is an initial assessment of the significance and scope of this structural lacuna, conducted through the study of the intellectual history of the difference between anxiety and boredom. In particular, I show that Freud never worked out a theory of boredom because anxiety had been the implicit presupposition of his psychoanalytic psychology. I also demonstrate that due to the same rationale of mutual exclusion, Heidegger, who discussed both phenomena extensively, never considered them in juxtaposition. To explain the development of Freud’s and Heidegger’s thought, I draw a distinction between anxiety and boredom that is analogous to the distinction between fear and anxiety. While anxiety is fear without the perception of actual danger, boredom is anxiety without the experience of actual fear; and since there is no fear in boredom, there is no guilt in boredom. On the basis of these essential distinctions, I propose the historical hypothesis that there has been a transition from anxiety to boredom in late modernity and that this transition is the emotional aspect of the history of secularization. Thus the oft-observed and -commented upon phenomenon of the expansion of boredom is the direct product of the secularization of anxiety; and while boredom has expanded as a secularized, guiltless, and inherently non-pathological form of what used to be religious anxiety, anxiety has proliferated in the form of a diagnostic category in psychopathological discourse. This latter process complements the former and is but another aspect of the history of secularization, which, in antithesis to the expansion of boredom, shows how guilt and the belief in the possibility of sin have persisted in secular forms