Bas asked:

I'm investigating the topic: boredom. I am now looking into this big human "problem" from an
philosophical point of view. Many philosophers from the past have said something about boredom but
till now beside some quotes I didn't find much study about this topic. If anyone can direct me further,
and anything is helpful, that would be very nice.

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The two discussions I know of are Schopenhauer and Heidegger, each is concerned with what and in
what manner boredom reveals about the way humans exist.

According to Schopenhauer "boredom is a direct proof that existence is itself valueless, for boredom
is nothing other than the sensation of the emptiness of existence" ('On The Vanity of Existence').
Elsewhere he argues that boredom is at the foundation of human society, this is because "The
striving after existence is what occupies all living things and keeps them in motion. When existence is
assured to them they do not know what to do with it. Therefore the (second) thing that sets them in
motion is the effort to get rid of the burden of existence, to make it no longer felt, 'to kill time' in other
words to escape from boredom...it causes beings who love one another as little as men do, to seek
one another so much, and this becomes the source of sociality" (The World as Will and
Representationvol 1, sec 57).

This is an interesting view, but I wonder if he is correct. When I first read your question I wondered
why you called boredom a problem, if it reveals a fundamental fact about the way we live what's
problematic about that? But then I remembered what being bored is like, boredom is it seems to me a
paradoxical psychological or emotional state to be in. One the one hand there is as Schopenhauer
recognises a desire not to be bored, it's not nice to be bored, we don't want to be bored, and yet on
the other hand we don't want anything else either, and its not for lack of options or opportunity, there
is always something else we can do. And yet if someone suggests something we just shrug our
shoulders and moan 'nah, I don't think so'. So boredom consists of two conflicting desires. I think that
is the problem we are confronted with. This might be an interesting approach for your studies.

There are two other properties Schopenhauer identifies that I think would be worthwhile pursuing.
The first is the fact that boredom revels a desire to 'escape from existence' to make it no longer felt.
One of my favourite philosophers, Levinas also uncovers such a desire in his essay appropriately
entitled 'On Escape'. He does so in terms of pleasure, shame and nausea and although he does not
discuss boredom, it would be an other interesting question as to whether it could be accommodated
in his descriptions in that essay, especially given the second property Schopenhauer identifies , i.e.
the temporal considerations bound up with boredom (one of Levinas's major concerns is to give an
account of who we experience time): 'To kill time".

This is also where Heidegger's interest lies. In his 'The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics;
World, Finitude, Solitude' he spends around one hundred pages talking about the various kinds of
boredom and there temporal structures, which is a kind of 'being held in limbo by time as it drags'.
Obviously I cannot condense 100 pages of investigations, descriptions and analysis here. But this
connection between time and boredom is it seems to me the most interesting aspect of boredom.

Brian Tee