I participated in a yearlong seminar of presentations for young researchers on the topic of Transcendental Idealism through the Sorbonne.  The below is based on my presentation.

The gauntlet of Hume that awakened Kant from his dogmatic slumber was centered around the problem of causation, and more generally how synthetic a priori judgments are possible.  Hume had noted that we associate causes with effects because we see them following one another all the time, but it is not a feature of the world.  We don’t see the necessity of the boiling of water following heating, just that effect follows upon cause.

Kant objected we do indeed experience necessity here, specifically in terms of irreversibility.  So, ball hitting ball is positively one directional, comparatively greater as a temporary change of form (liquid to gas) when you boil water, and superlatively one-directional such as in cooking an egg which then can’t be uncooked.  Causality is thus a rule furnished by the understanding to certain processes which make them “appear” as causal.  Kant calls the understanding the faculty of rules and so for instance for a shape to appear to us as a triangle, that we “recognize it,” the mind must apply the rule “enclosed figure with 3 straight sides” to sense.

Of course, locating causality in the understanding doesn’t solve the problem because our experience of cause isn’t unrelated to reality, but very dependent on it.  It’s not any process that appears superlatively one-directional, but specifically cooking an egg that can’t be uncooked.  Heidegger then rightly wants to emphasize Kant needs to posit a third thing, the faculty of the imagination, which mediates between sense and understanding.  The problem of supposing an inner self and an outer world, is that getting from one to the other creates problems.  We can suppose and describe how causality as a three-tiered rule of irreversibility allows a process to “appear as” causal, but this doesn’t answer why always cause is experienced in certain processes and not others? Cause is unclear as is in a sense both an activity of the mind and a feature of reality.

Heidegger suggests that in order to untangle this knot we need to rethink the person/world relationship.  One way is to look at a mental phenomenon that is also obviously a feature of the world.  A prime example of this is boredom.  If I say a book is boring, I mean it is a feature of the book for me like plot, characters, and setting, yet I know it isn’t an objective feature of the book since the book need not “appear boringly” for the next person.  We see, then, boringness is wholly dependent on the book yet is a mental phenomenon, meaning the book richly has the potential for boringness as a way it might encounter a reader.

And in fact, we seem to see with the Greeks historically thinking boredom was a feature of the world and not an internal mental state.  Toohey describes the Greeks initially didn’t have a word for boredom that maps onto ours, and so expressed it outwardly and metaphorically.  Aristophanes in the Archarnians has one character say 

“I grown, I yawn, I stretch, I fart, I don’t know what to do.  I write, I pull at my hair, I figure things out as I look to the country, longing for peace.  (30-32).” 

He does not name that he is bored, but describes the symptoms.  Similarly, Euripides’ Medea describes men becoming fed up or bored, had enough of their families, and then acting unfairly (244-46), but again, boredom as an emotion is not named.

Apollodorus in Plato’s Symposium 173c says nothing gives him more pleasure than discussing philosophy, but listening to the idle conversations of the rich is boring because they prattle on about nothing and do nothing.  This shows us a clear view of how the thinkers looked down on the highest values of regular people (wealth), and agrees with Heraclitus’ point that the masses are like well fed cattle.  Pindar said too lengthy an exposition might lead to boredom, but again the symptoms are named, not boredom.  By contrast, Plutarch matter of factly talks about the boredom of soldiers due to apraxia, a lexical obvious term apparently missing from earlier Greek times.

Iliad 24. 403 and Euripides Iphigeneia in Aulis 804-8 seem to both demand a word for boredom.  The Greek for the condition of the soldiers in the Iliad passage suggests they were not merely bored, but vexed and disgusted at having to wait. Ennius (239-169 BCE) points back to his interpretation of Euripides play and writes “We are not home and not on military service.  We go here.  We go there.  When we’ve gone there we want to go away.  The mind wanders indecisively; we only live a sort of a life.”  They go here and there, but cannot settle or derive satisfaction from life because of a lack of things to do (praeterpropter vitam vivitur).  We can see the connection to the wandering shades. “Horror loci:” revulsion at where one is. 

If we can think back to a notion of boredom not yet encased in a hermetically sealed “I” but as a feature of the world, this helps us overcome Hume’s challenge when we see causality is a category of the understanding and a feature of the world.  We can then see this structure in other phenomena, like how the world appears to the schizophrenic as conspiracy saturated, or the world appears as holy to the religious person.