BOREDOM

Baudelaire and the Experience of the Abyss, published posthumously in 1947, was a manuscript Fondane had worked on during the war and left in an incomplete and somewhat disordered state. Published editions, the most complete being that of 1994, represent a selection of the many pages he wrote.

In this chapter, Fondane attributes to Baudelaire the discovery that boredom is not simply a passing mood affecting individuals but can also be a state of mind affecting an entire culture, a “malaise of civilization” that gives rise to the most excessive and extravagant forms of cruelty: the manias of self-torture during the Middle Ages, for example, or the horrors of the Second World War. Baudelaire’s poetry forms the heart of Fondane’s analysis, but his essay also bears comparison to Martin Heidegger’s account of boredom in “What Is Metaphysics?” (1929) and to Blaise Pascal’s remarks on boredom and inconstancy as revealing the nothingness and impotence of the human condition.[1]

WE ARE going to take one last look at Baudelaire’s religious experience, and in particular at the deep and subterranean current of that experience, which more than anything else makes Baudelaire “the poet of modernity.” For is he not also the poet of boredom? Of course, we are not talking about the boredom of empty Sundays, out-of-tune pianos, vacant lots, of aimless leisure, the boredom of overabundance, of satisfied wealth, pleasure, and health, although Baudelaire is also a past master of boredom of that sort. This merely aesthetic boredom is only a superficial layer of metaphysical boredom, and about the latter, we do not really know what it is. It is clear that Baudelaire’s boredom is not a personal boredom but civilization’s boredom,[2] and perhaps the boredom of the cosmos. That is why boredom takes on such immense and significant proportions in his work. It would be vain to ask where boredom takes up residence; it is nowhere to be found in the existent.[3] And yet the instant boredom occurs, it covers and exhausts the existent to such an extent that one could rightly claim that the existent has vanished and only boredom exists. What is it? The feeling the nonexistent has of its existence—or rather the feeling existence has that it does not exist? The world collapses for lack of interest, although it continues to subsist; an invisible Maya deprives us of real things one by one and transforms them into appearances while leaving them intact: They have not changed, we are the same, it seems, and a philosopher would remark with astonishment that basically nothing is missing: Things have retained all the predicates that make them into realities: figure, extension, mass, velocity, it is all there. Why then does the clockwork seem to be damaged as if it were moving in slow motion? It no longer tells the time, and consequently, sensation is not transformed into perception, perception is not transformed into concepts: Nothing any longer becomes. It is true that we can no longer love or hate, but what of that? Does the hand on the clockface derive its movement from our hate or our love? We grasp very clearly that the Logical continues, but softly, confusedly; it then clears off and dies. So it was not the Logical that was the essence of the real? Does the Logical too require a motor, a passion? A passion that itself is not logical? Obviously, the Logical did not know this and it is too caught up in itself to read what Baudelaire has to tell us—as have many others before him, for the thought is not new. In one of his youthful writings (La Fanfarlo), Baudelaire says, “We are like a traveler who sadly makes his way toward a desert which feels to him similar to the one he just traveled through, escorted by a pale phantom we call Reason, which illuminates with a pale lantern the aridity of his road and who, in order to quench the renascent thirst of the passions that grip him from time to time, pours him the poison of the enemy.” A subtle contemporary analyst,[4] who has devoted a vast study to what he inappropriately calls the “metaphysics of boredom” (inappropriately, because to assign material, physical causes to an object is physics, and to attribute to objects an a priori form is criticism[5]—but our author does not get that far), will take up this intuition with boldness. He says there can be boredom only when there is consciousness, and mainly speculative consciousness: the reflection of the self upon itself, the stripping bare of existence by a meditation on existence, the disaffection of life by thought. Boredom is thus thought’s malaise par excellence. No doubt after that he will advise us not to delve too deeply into the question, to avoid solitude, and to make sure that we go home accompanied by “society”: Its chatter will do us good by forcing us to no longer think about boredom because, he says, “Nothing good for us can come from there.”[6] And he right away reveals, albeit reluctantly, what he means by that: “It is well understood that original sin is a metaphysics that does not contain anything thinkable.”[7]

Vast indeed is the domain of that which does not contain anything thinkable. But what is strange is that the “metaphysics” of boredom suddenly gives up, recognizes its incompetence, and hands over the matter to a “theology” of boredom. To be sure, this theology remains to be worked out, it does not yet exist, but it is already posited with the simple affirmation that boredom . . . is sin. That at any rate is how Baudelaire thinks of boredom, and that is frankly a new thought, one the poet draws from his own well. Right away, with the strange certainty of a sleepwalker, he discovers that:

Il en est un plus laid, plus méchant, plus immonde!

Quoiqu’il ne pousse ni grands gestes ni grands cris,

Il ferait volontiers de la terre un débris

Et dans un bâillement avalerait le monde;

is even uglier and fouler than the rest,

although the least flamboyant of the lot;

this beast would gladly undermine the earth

and swallow all creation in a yawn;

Boredom—a vice. The ugliest, the meanest, the vilest! Greater than all the moral vices because

And in spite of ourselves, we think that this intuition joins up with the various speculative currents which have concluded with Ecclesiastes that knowledge is “bitter,”[9] with Nietzsche that it is “pain,” with Meyerson that it leads to acosmism.[10] A slender thread separates “serenity” from boredom, “lukewarmness” from indifference, the emotional vacuum from the Logical. Having driven out hot and cold—that is, the “renascent thirst of the passions”—boredom swallows the world in a yawn. Right away, as soon as boredom is there,

Morne esprit, autrefois amoureux de la lutte,

L’Espoir, dont l’éperon attisait ton ardeur

Ne veux plus t’enfourcher! . . .

[. . .weary mind!

Now Hope, whose spur awakened all your zeal,

no longer even mounts. . . .

and even Spring has lost its sweet allure!]

Et de longs corbillards, sans tambours ni musique,

Défilent lentement dans mon âme; l’Espoir,

Vaincu, pleure . . .[14]

[—And giant hearses, without dirge or drums,

parade at half-step in my soul, where Hope,

defeated, weeps . . .]

Poet of modernity. No one has expressed the anxiety of acosmism better than Baudelaire, for boredom is anxiety, and as acosmism is nothingness, boredom is anxiety in the face of nothingness. We have often said that when it suits him, Baudelaire repeats the theology he was taught, and that he often repeats the thought of Joseph de Maistre. But here a new and original idea makes its appearance. He no longer sees Evil in sensual pleasure or in “nature,” but contrary to his Christian heritage, this time he sees it . . . in Boredom. This explains the tremendous significance that boredom takes on in Baudelaire’s thought. Boredom is no longer a “state of mind” but a state of sin, the crime par excellence which does not appear on the list of theological sins. The devil is no longer a sophist who persuades us to seek pleasure and excess; it is no longer the flesh that he tempts but the mind, and what he suggests to the mind is no longer pride and disobedience but the refusal to participate in being. That is how he leads us

. . . loin du regard de Dieu,

Haletant et brisé de fatigue, au milieu

Des plaines de l’Ennui, profondes et désertes,

Et jette dans mes yeux de confusion

Des vêtements souillés, des blessures ouvertes,

Et l’appareil sanglant de la Destruction![16]

[. . . out of God’s regard,

spent and gasping—out to where the vast

barrens of Boredom stretch infinitely,

and here he hurls into my startled face

the opened wounds, the rags they have soaked through,

and all Destruction’s bloody bag of tricks!]

Yes, Jankélévitch is right: “Nothing good for us can come from there.” Original sin envisaged as disobedience was something intelligible; we know that on this Spinoza agreed with the Theologia Deutsch[17] in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.[18] It is still intelligible when envisaged as sexuality; Schopenhauer, that disciple of India, declares himself in agreement with Christianity on this point.[19] But nothing good for us can come “from there” or from preserving the myth of original sin as something “thinkable” if, as Schopenhauer proclaims with Nietzsche, knowledge is pain and nothing remains for us but the salutary truths of homines religiosi [priests]. Nothing good for us can come “from there” if the tree of knowledge is the source of our unhappiness or if, as Byron says, “The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.”[20]

“We are forced to conclude,” writes Stéphane Lupasco in his remarkable work Du Devenir Logique et de l’Affectivité,[21] “not that rational or intuitive knowledge has as its aim the elimination of affectivity or of that which bears the characteristics of being [in Lupasco’s doctrine, affectivity indeed has the character of being or of a noumenon],[22] but that through its elaboration, rational or intuitive knowledge constitutes the conditions of the disappearance of this ‘affective’ ontological given from the heart of what founds it, that is, from logical becoming” (vol. 2, 287). He adds, a few pages later: “From this point, existence, as crisis, will still contain affectivity, and either a positive or a painful affectivity, although increasingly pallid (passing from anxiety to worry and finally to boredom); but in the virtuality which progressively passes from its pure concept to action, it always remains as something like the hope for a rigorous affective void, for a definitive break with being” (vol. 2, 290–91).[23]

It is impossible for us to discuss here the profound and often fertile views of Lupasco concerning the relations between logic and affectivity. But whatever his particular theory on this point, he remains in agreement with us that the Logical’s wish is “like the hope for a rigorous affective void,” and that this affective void leads necessarily from “serenity” to anxiety, to worry, and finally to boredom. It would doubtless not be proper to hold that rational knowledge has the elimination of affectivity as its goal—for that would entail the existence of a relation and perhaps even of a conflict between logic and affectivity, something Lupasco’s doctrine would reject. But a quick glance at the History of Philosophy shows that the elimination of affectivity from the heart of logic has not always taken place naturally and, as it were, automatically. The struggle against affectivity is first and foremost in speculative thought, until it finally presents itself without masks in Spinoza’s triumphal hymn, non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere.[24] The relation and the conflict between logic and affectivity exist, even if they are inexplicable.

It seems that more than once the Logical has been on the verge of reaching its goal. But each time, at the very moment when it seemed to have attained its goal, instead of producing the hoped for serenity, the affective void has resulted in anxiety, worry, and finally boredom, boredom with living. Evil has certainly been crushed, but so has Good. And how then can one make existence out of inexistence, courage out of cowardice, how, without passion, can one put anything at all in motion, even the Logical, even the pure Act? How can we conceive of acts without determinations, determinations without reasons for acting, reasons without affective impulses? It seems that therein lies a mystery—a secular mystery, to be sure—that is, a mystery of which we have agreed not to speak, namely: It is when they have attained the highest degree of civilization that societies collapse and in spite of that, societies do not cease to aspire to the highest state of civilization. Running blindly to their destruction while convinced that it is the Good: This is nevertheless the only lesson we can draw from the myths of original sin and of the Tower of Babel. If this lesson did not correspond to the facts, we would have long ago abandoned the myths. It is not faith that keeps them alive. But we have not reached the end of the lesson. Boredom still has a few things to tell us.

In Baudelaire’s boredom, there are other things besides what we would normally expect based on the definition of boredom which its metaphysicians have given us. It seems to me that more than one reader must have wondered why the poet granted such excessive importance to this state of mind, and why, in sum, he says that boredom “dreams of hangings as it puffs its pipe.”[25] An ever-more pallid affectivity, the wish of the Logical, according to the philosopher [Lupasco], went from anxiety to worry, and finally from worry to boredom. But if we are to believe Baudelaire—and by that I mean Baudelaire’s poetry—the cycle cannot end there. Boredom in turn gives rise to an immense need for stimulants, which are capable, according to his beliefs, of pulling him out of his state of apathy. He does not shrink from any means: drugs, debauchery, violence, cruelty, these are what Baudelaire calls “artificial paradises,”[26] the vain attempt to reestablish a lost equilibrium.

Perhaps a day will come when the historian will agree to take a look at the basest forms of boredom in History. It is boredom that is the source of sudden changes, of wars without reasons, of deadly revolutions; there is no more effective cause than boredom. A need arises, the need to feel oneself existing, to break the monotony of being, of the purely thinkable. Murder, vengeance, the joy of destroying for the sake of destroying are given free rein in a people who a short time ago seemed peaceful and wise, the supreme flower of a fully realized civilization. Historians will say afterward that political, economic, and social causes explain this outburst; of course they will, but they will not have grasped the elementary fact that the people were bored. It was Greco-Roman boredom which suddenly crystallized as anxiety, worry, and unrest, and which resulted in unheard-of cruelties that by way of reaction assured the victory of Christianity. Then ten centuries without history, of immutable order, and at the very moment civilization was once again at its peak, when Greek thought and Aristotle’s thought triumphed, all of a sudden a strange phenomenon takes hold of the Middle Ages: the keen, constant, and passionate desire for suffering and more suffering. One wants to feel oneself existing; but it is impossible to exist in already given cognitive frameworks, in immutable social and religious frameworks which proclaim that existence is . . . mere appearance. And what better reveals existence if not the feeling of pain? But what better unleashes pain than cruelty? Simple souls, the masses, will resort to external cruelty: Inquisitions, the stake, massacres of heretics, Crusades. But subtler minds will turn against themselves. They will then invent whips, hair shirts; they will fast, they will not sleep; they will make use of an immense imagination to discover new tortures, new crosses to bear every day. It is on the vast canvas of boredom that they will embroider cruelties and crucifixions, and there that they will strike down the enemy: the devil, nothingness. And when torture itself becomes powerless, when the imagination becomes exhausted, then the primitive fabric will reappear on the surface: acedia.[27] “The absence of God,” the mystics will say. No doubt! But also the absence of the devil, for nothing remains where immutable, immobile boredom reigns. One has to exist in order to believe; the object in which one believes must exist, not just thought but also felt, and not just thinking but also feeling. That perhaps accounts for the faith in the one crucified God during the Middle Ages. It was necessary to make Aristotle’s unmoved mover suffer unto death in order to give him a semblance of life. It was necessary to kill Boredom, and therefore the Logical, even in God.

To illustrate this thesis, I chose an extremely complicated example that is subject to multiple interpretations. I would have made myself better understood if I had shown Roman boredom resulting in the anguish of the empire, the infinite cruelties of Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, and Heliogabalus. It seems that their cruelty produces quite a different sound. But in fact one could almost say that advanced civilizations end in a philosophy of cruelty when they have not begun with a philosophy of frivolity.

“Frivolity?” you will say, as if you had never studied the Sophists, the Skeptics, Aristippus, and Epicurus. Jankélévitch, who ends his metaphysics of Boredom with a sort of paraphrase of Horace’s Carpe Diem, nevertheless wonders “Who would dare to recommend frivolity to us?”[28] Who? Why, the same man who would also recommend cruelty, the most profound religious mind of the nineteenth century, the ascetic, the pessimist, the tragic man par excellence: Nietzsche. Elsewhere, I have already cited and commented on the text where Nietzsche develops the theme that “knowledge is pain,”[29] and declares:

How one would love to exchange the false assertions of homines religiosi—that there is a God, that he requires that we do Good, that he watches over and witnesses every action and every thought at every moment, that he loves us, that in every misfortune he desires our greater well-being —how one would love to exchange these for truths that would be just as salutary, calming and beneficial as these errors are. . . . But that is precisely the tragedy, that one cannot believe in these dogmas of religion and metaphysics if one has the strict method of truth in one’s mind and heart. . . . From this there thus arises the danger that man may bleed to death from contact with acknowledged truth, or rather with error unveiled. This is what Byron expressed in his immortal verse: “Sorrow is Knowledge: They who know the most must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth. The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.” Against such worries there is no better means of help than to evoke Horace’s magnificent frivolity. . . and to follow him in asking oneself, “Why do you torment your little mind about eternal plans? Why not go and stretch out under that tall plane tree or that pine?”[30]

Nietzsche did dare; he recommended magnificent frivolity to us. But he himself could not remain content with that: Frivolity is not given to all who seek it. It is even interesting to note how rare and fleeting frivolity has been in history; how quickly the little mind under the tall plane tree or the pine falls into the dullest boredom. And then one sees torments appearing on the horizon: debauchery, drunkenness. These are not, contrary to what one may think, “pleasures,” “animal joys.” Please God that they were only that! They are atrocious torments, albeit artificial ones, meant to make us forget what we take to be the truth: that we do not exist, that nothing exists . . . except Nothingness. It is thus that, contrary to the Kingdom of Sleeping Beauty where all the needles had been banned, one fills the kingdom of thought with needles: But thought wants many more than exist. Cruelty is the daughter of Boredom. Both of them are daughters of First Science,[31] of the pure concept, in which “there always remains something like the hope for a rigorous affective void, for a definitive break with Being.”[32] It is only when man obeys non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere that the Devil leads us, according to Baudelaire:

Already at the age of eighteen, Baudelaire wrote to his mother: “What I feel is an immense discouragement, an unbearable feeling of isolation, a perpetual fear of a vague unhappiness, a complete breakdown of my forces, a total absence of desires, an impossibility of finding any kind of amusement . . . I ceaselessly ask myself, ‘What is the use of this?,’ ‘What good is that?’ This is the real spirit of melancholy (spleen) . . . I do not remember ever having fallen so low or dragging myself through boredom for such a long time.” No doubt, it is not yet by himself, in himself, that Baudelaire, having attained wisdom, finds that he has produced his boredom. But he is a child of the nineteenth century, idealist, positivist, and logical, and which, just like him, is vainly trying to escape from the boredom and difficulty that it has given itself. He is the child of an urban civilization where, according to Jankélévitch, society takes you home, sits down at your table, and is continually present in order to prevent you from being alone and taking advantage of your solitude. It is in order to escape from this boredom and to fight it that Baudelaire flees from “the tyranny of the human face”[34] and sets up a whole program of “diversions”:[35]

Dans quel philtre, dans quel vin, dans quelle tisane

Noierons-nous ce vieil ennemi,

Destructeur et gourmand comme la courtisane,

Patient comme la fourmi?[36]

[What drug, what wine is warranted to drown

this ancient enemy

greedier and more wanton than the whores,

more patient than the ants?]

But the wine, hashish, brothels, and opium in which Baudelaire many times tried to drown his boredom are only vulgar means of escape; it is difficult to read in these the poet’s strange idea that boredom is original sin. But consider the effects of his boredom on a moral level: “I understand how one can desert a cause in order to know what one would feel by serving another.” Or elsewhere: “It would be sweet to be alternately victim and the torturer!”[37] And then this one, which I cite only to make clearer the thought that has so terribly agitated our time: “Beautiful conspiracy to organize for the extermination of the Jewish race.” A motivated beautiful conspiracy? No, because Baudelaire immediately adds: “The Jews, librarians and witnesses of the Redemption.” But what useless beautiful cruelty! Not even cowardly! For Baudelaire asks no better, as we have seen, than to be alternatively victim and executioner; it matters little to him whether he exterminates or is exterminated. What he wants is a beautiful blaze to destroy and forget his boredom. Alas, one cannot burn down Rome every day.

We know that Baudelaire did not hesitate to ask for this joy of oblivion from real, historical cruelty. He joyfully breathed “the air of crime” during the revolution of 1848 without worrying one bit about its aims. But all of that was in vain:

Peut-on illuminer en ciel bourbeux et noir?

Peut-on déchirer les ténèbres

Plus denses que la poix, sans matin et sans soir ...

. . . . . . . . . .

L’Espérance qui brille aux carreaux de l’Auberge

Est soufflée, est morte à jamais!

. . . . . . . . . .

L’Irréparable ronge, avec sa dent maudite

Notre âme, piteux monument

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mais mon coeur, que jamais ne visite l’extase,

Est un théâtre où l’on attend

Toujours, toujours en vain, l’Etre aux ailes de gaze![38]

[What wind can sweep the ashes from this sky,

what stars can pierce the gloom

that never deepens, never pales

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Hope’s candle at the window of the inn

glimmers and goes out.

. . . . . . . . . .

Nothing can withstand the Irreparable—

its termites undermine

our soul, pathetic citadel . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

On my heart’s stage occurs

no transformation scene.

No creature made of light will come to me!]

I doubt that the reader will want to recognize in cruelty, the daughter of Boredom, one of the most profound religious phenomena of the nineteenth century, albeit one with a negative aspect, this time offering as support for the proof of the existence of God not Faith but sin. I doubt the reader can admit that in the absence of faith, sin can inherit all the privileges of the religious dimension of existence, and that it is in sin’s theater the Being with wings of gauze will ever make an appearance. . . . It is not my intention to persuade him. I do not claim to fathom the ways of a God who is said to be unfathomable. Nor is it my intention to advise the reader to listen to the voice of the Amen, of the faithful witness: “I know your works. You are neither hot nor cold. Would that you were hot or cold!” (Revelation 3:15). But perhaps the reader will want to join me in thinking about the significance of cruelty that can be found in works as representative of our times as those of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Dostoyevsky. Perhaps he will want to recognize in the social-ethical and political programs of our times that it is the lack of significance of the existent which finds its expression in an enormous massacre of men and freedoms, in a wild gallop across the human dimension that claims to want to save man—from who knows what. It is not just might or cruelty but war itself—war in itself— which before our eyes has found wild and unbridled apologists: writers, philosophers. They propose to us justifying in advance “the most terrible and most necessary wars,”[39] although the authors of these doctrines would be hard-pressed to tell us why and for whom they are “necessary.” They ask us to sacrifice the most elevated specimens of our humanity[40]—but without suffering from it, adds Nietzsche. Not even Nietzsche dares to admit that war is a “mystery” that eludes our grasp, just like life and passion, just like birth and death, and that if it is stupid to reject it or to judge it, it is a thousand times more stupid to justify it or glorify it. For war that is willed and no longer just undergone is vastly more deadly. But it is precisely this that Nietzsche wants: It is not biological war whose praises he sings but intellectual war: What he wants is war for nothing, in order to increase suffering, to drown boredom, to feel oneself living in a world from which “real life is absent.”[41] But his contemporary, Rimbaud, does not shrink from saying it:

What are torrents of blood and blazing embers, to us, my heart,

And a thousand murders, and long howls

Of rage, sobs from all of hell, overturning

All order?

. . . . . . . . . .

All to war, to vengeance, to terror,

My spirit! Let us turn the knife in the wound: Ah! Pass away,

Republics of this world!

. . . . . . . . . .

Europe, Asia, America: disappear![42]

Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l’incendie,

N’ont pas encore brodé de leurs plaisants dessins

Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins,

C’est que notre âme, hélas! n’est pas assez hardie.[43]

[If rape and arson, poison and the knife

have not yet stitched their ludicrous designs

onto the banal buckram of our fates,

it is because our souls lack enterprise!]

That is what he says in a poem. But even in a private, personal letter, Baudelaire writes: “Man needs vengeance like a tired person needs a bath.”

Such is the drama that takes place between Nothingness, whose greatest ruse is to persuade us that it is Being,[44] and the existent, who in order to feel alive (“real life is absent,” said Rimbaud), in order to summon to him the Being made of light (“I wait for God with greediness,” Rimbaud also said), knows no other recourse than cruelty. Vague unhappiness has come into the world; Aristotle’s God, the unmoved primum movens [first mover], has produced nothing but Boredom. In that case, as Baudelaire says, “What is the use of this? What good is that?” If the ideal, if boredom, exists, then what are we to do with our self? Cruelty alone seems to bear witness still to the absolute refusal of twentieth-century man to put up with the “autonomous” intelligere[45] that has done away with the sun and the Milky Way and the “sad self,”[46] and which has forced man to die like a rat poisoned in a hole.[47] “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted,” cried old Karamazov.[48] If God does not exist, then homo hominis lupus:[49] Let us burn Rome, exterminate the Jews, sacrifice the highest specimens of our humanity! God, sin, contain nothing thinkable; intelligere has not finished telling us that nothing good for us can come from there. This is the proof of God by the absurd, and we are all involved in it. The reign of cruelty has only just begun. This, it seems to me, is Boredom’s apocalypse.[50]