- Yawns come in a variety of shapes and sizes.
They appear at various times, and in many
different places. Yawns open more than mouths;
they open also the possibility of analysis. They
can be elucidated aesthetically, clinically,
ethically, sociologically, and probably even
politically. A yawn may tell us one of a number
of things: that the yawner is sleepy, that he or
she is not getting enough oxygen, or that he or
she is bored. While the yawn of boredom may
initially not look very interesting, appearances
here are deceptive. As paradoxical as it may
seem, boredom is not itself boring. It is, in
fact, a fascinating subject - especially to a
phenomenologist.
-
- Fortunately, the contemporary
phenomenologist who undertakes to examine the
yawn need not begin with an unexplored chasm.
The investigative gap has been partially filled
by Jean-Paul Sartre's analyses in his novel
Nausea, though much more work remains to be
done.
-
- Sartre is noted for his brilliant and
profound descriptions of a wide variety of human
phenomena. In Being and Nothingness, for
example, he has carefully and perceptively
depicted the shame of the individual who, while
looking through the keyhole, realizes that he in
turn is being observed by another, the
self-deception of the waiter in the cafe, as
well as that of the woman with her would-be
lover. Similarly sensitive and revealing is his
analysis of the yawn of boredom.
 - Antoine Roquentin, the diarist of Nausea, is
in Bouville, a town where little if anything
ever seems to happen, studying M. de Rollebon, a
somewhat shadowy figure of minor historical
significance. He is bored with Bouville, with M.
de Rollebon. He is even bored with his life of
"eat, sleep, sleep, eat." He declares: "I am
bored, that's all. From time to time I yawn so
widely that tears roll down my cheek. It is a
profound boredom, profound, the profound heart
of existence, the very matter I am made
of."
-
- «La Nausée me
laisse un court répit. Mais je sais
qu'elle reviendra : c'est mon état
normal. Seulement, aujourd'hui mon corps est
trop épuisé pour la supporter. Les
malades aussi ont d'heureuses faiblesses qui
leur ôtent, quelques heures, la conscience
de leur mal. Je m'ennuie, c'est tout. De temps
en temps je bâille si fort que les
larmes me roulent sur les joues. C'est un ennui
profond, profond, le cœur profond de
l'existence, la matière même dont
je suis fait. Je ne me néglige pas, bien
au contraire : ce matin j'ai pris un bain, je me
suis rasé. Seulement, quand je repense
à tous ces petits actes soigneux, je ne
comprends pas comment j'ai pu les faire - ils
sont si vains. Ce sont les habitudes, sans
doute, qui les ont faits pour moi. Elles ne sont
pas mortes, elles, elles continuent à
s'affairer, à tisser tout doucement,
insidieusement leurs trames, elles me lavent,
m'essuient,m'habillent, comme des nourrices.
Est-ce que ce sont elles, aussi. qui m'ont
conduit sur cette colline ? Je ne me rappelle
plus comment je suis venu. Par l'escalier
Dautry, sans doute : est-ce que j'ai gravi
vraiment une à une ses cent dix marches ?
Ce qui est peut-être encore plus difficile
à imaginer, c'est que, tout à
l'heure, je vais les redescendre. Pourtant, je
le sais : je me retrouverai dans un moment au
bas du Coteau Vert, je pourrai, en levant la
tête, voir s'éclairer au loin les
fenêtres de ces maisons qui sont si
proches. Au loin. Au-dessus de ma tête; et
cet instant-ci, dont je ne puis sortir, qui
m'enferme et me borne de tout côté,
cet instant dont je suis fait ne sera plus qu'un
songe brouillé.»
(p221-222)
-
- This is not simple, everyday boredom; it is,
Sartre tells us "profound boredom." And it is
profound not only in its intensity, as indicated
by tears running down Roquentin's cheeks, but
also in revealing a deep and seldom noticed
aspect of things. It is precisely this
awareness, profoundly felt, which constitutes
nausea, an experience which provides a unique
access to an existence which usually hides
itself: as the "veneer" of diversity-the
individuality of the root, the park gates, the
bench, the grass-vanishes, existence unveils
itself as "the very paste of things ... soft,
monstrous masses, all in disorder-naked, in a
frightful, obscene nakedness."
-
- This experience of nausea is closely
connected, in Sartre's thought, with the yawn.
Like Camus' feeling of unfamiliarity, it
signifies a breaking-down of the normal way of
seeing things in their familiar individuality.
Unlike Camus' feeling of unfamiliarity, however,
Sartre's nausea is not merely an awareness of
the inhuman aspect of things, other persons, and
one's self: an experience of "nature without
humanity." It is also an actual experience of, a
privileged access to, the very being of things,
the in-itself of Being and Nothingness. In
nausea, one feels the unbearable "touch" of
objects, one's unbearable connection with
them.
-
- Admittedly nausea is a unique boredom-as
Sartre says, a "profound boredom." It provides
access to the very being of things and thereby
may lead us to an awareness of ourselves as the
source of meaning and value in the world. Nausea
is primarily an experience of the initself. Is
this truc of ail boredom?
-
- I realize that such a question may seem
strange to anyone familiar with Sartre's
accounts of our bad faith flights from freedom
and responsibility and of our reactions in
shame, arrogance, love, language, masochism,
indifference, desire, hate, and sadism to the
looks of others. Given these analyses, it may
seem obvious that boredom, and hence the bored
yawn, must always be connected ultimately with
the in-itself -the being of things - and not
with the for-itself - the nothingness of
consciousness. Or, to formulate the issue with
respect to ourselves and others, it may appear
self-evident that boredom must be connected with
facticity-that aspect of ourselves most closely
connected with the being of things- and not with
freedom and transcendence.
 - Given these analyses, it seems that one can
be bored with oneself and with others only in
certain restricted ways, that is, only with the
facticity, past, and object-side of each.
Accordingly, one could become bored with one's
own or another's situation, with either's body,
class, and economic status, or with what. either
has managed to make of himself, with past and
prescrit accomplishments, or with the way each
sees or is seen by the other. What appears
impossible is that one could be bored with the
freedom and transcendence of oneself or of
another. It is just this that I want to
challenge.
-
- With respect to one's own freedom, Sartre
proposes that one may respond with despair,
anguish, and a sense of abandonment. Unwilling
to recognize and accept the extent of one's
freedom and responsibility, an individual may
flee in bad faith from the recognition of his
freedom, hiding behind excuses which he himself
in some sense knows to be illegitimate. He may
become, for example, a "serious man," a man who
regards his values as given and ready-made and
his imperatives as unquestioned and even
unquestionable. Surely Sartre is right that
boredom is possible here. The serious individual
is almost certainly bound to be boring to
others, if not to himself.
-
- One may, however, flee one's freedom in a
radically different way. Sartre's examples of
the woman with her would-be lover and of the
homosexual are examples of individuals who try
to escape their freedom and its consequent
responsibility by emphasizing freedom itself,
but in a very restricted sense. They try to
treat themselves as abstract freedom and thus to
deny the concrete freedoms that they are.
Wanting to postpone the moment of decision, the
woman refuses to recognize the implicit
commitment she makes as she leaves her hand
"between the warm hands of her companion." She
divorces herself from her body by drawing her
companion into a lofty and sentimental
discussion of "Life" and of her life in
particular. Thus, her hand does not commit her;
as a mere thing, it can neither consent to nor
resist the man's advances.
-
- Similarly, Sartre's homosexual refuses, in
spite of the urging by his critic (the "champion
of sincerity"), to admit that he is a
homosexual. Refusing to acknowledge a past of
homosexual activities, he affirms his freedom.
In ignoring his past, this affirmation is at
best an affirmation of an abstract freedom.
-
- These individuals who paradoxically flee
their freedom and responsibility by fleeing into
their freedom and transcendence, away from their
facticity, thereby resemble Kierkegaard's
aesthete. And it is significant that it is the
aesthete who, in Kierkegaard's presentation, is
plagued by boredom. The aesthete does everything
in his power to avoid commitment: lie guards
against friendship, avoids marriage, never
accepts appointment to official positions, and
engages in all sorts of improductive activities
to keep himself active in a way that is
compatible with his leisure. Yet he is bored: he
cares for nothing; his view of life is "utterly
meaningless;" "life has become a bitter drink."
He says, "How terrible tedium is - terribly
tedious. ...[T]he only thing I see is
emptiness, the only thing I move about in is
emptiness. The aesthete finds himself and others
boring: "all men are bores." Boredom entered the
world with Adam and only increased
proportionately as the population
increased.
-
- I find it significant that Kierkegaard
recognizes boredom as a problem for the aesthete
but not for Judge William, the "moral man" of
Volume II of Either/Or. The moral man, like
Sartre's serious man, flees from his freedom to
his facticity and hides behind what he is, his
status in the community, what he has been, what
is expected of him, his marriage, and the
comfortable conformity with the status quo which
is encouraged by the moral imperative's demand
of universalizability. At best only slightly
troubled by the country pastor's affirmation
that "against God we are always in the wrong,"
Judge William is certainly not troubled by
boredom in spite of the fact that his
self-righteousness and myopically moral advice
make him, for many of us, "an intolerable
bore."
-
- This seems to be exactly the opposite of
what we would expect. The individual who flees
into abstract freedom and becomes "fantastic" is
the one who may become the more bored. He spends
his time entertaining himself, existing in the
abstract, languishing in his weightlessness. Of
course, his is really not a genuine sense and
utilization of freedom inasmuch as he uses his
freedom as a way to avoid confronting himself
and acknowledging the necessity of choosing.
Still, though, the mere fact that Kierkegaard
recognizes such a threat of boredom in this
level of existence suggests that the connection
of boredom with facticity far from exhausts the
phenomenon of boredom.
-
- Of greater importance is the question of
what happens if an individual does not flee his
freedom and transcendence but rather confronts
them authentically. Many see problems at this
point, fearing that one must choose between the
serious and what Kierkegaard calls the
"hypothetical. self": a self which "... does not
for an instant stand firm ... [since it]
exercises quite as much the power of loosing as
of binding, every instant it can quite
arbitrarily begin all over again..." A
hypothetical person is, like Dostoevsky's
Underground Man, always so painfully and
explicitly aware that he and he alone must
choose and thereby create his own foundations
for acting that he can never act. Since, before
acting, he must always first question his
earlier decision to act, he cannot escape from
this never-ending need to reaffirm his previous
choice. He knows all too well that he can tear
down as arbitrarily as he has built, that he
remains free to reject what he has previously
accepted and to accept what he has
rejected.
-
- It seems possible, however, for Sartre to
escape this alleged dilemma of the ready-made
values of the serious, on the one hand, and the
paralysis of the constant reevaluation of the
hypothetical, on the other. Sartre's reasons for
rejecting the serious have already been
examined. In addition, Sartre could deal with
the hypothetical man's infinite postponement of
action in much the same way that a utilitarian
such as Bentham deals with the alleged need to
calculate the pleasurable and painful
consequences of every possible action in a given
situation. Like Bentham, Sartre could point out
that we are responsible for our postponement of
decision and our inaction, which is just to say
that we choose to postpone, to requestion, and
to calculate, rather than to act in some other
way.
-
- Although Sartre would thus reject both horns
of this dilemma, a question nevertheless remains
as to what the third (and authentic) alternative
would be. Clearly, the authentic individual must
recognize and affirm his or her freedom.
Initially, this accepting recognition would no
doubt be as exhilarating as the rejecting
recognition of freedom was terrifying for the
individual in bad faith. In recognizing one's
freedom in this authentic way, an individual may
be enormously elated. He or she may spin dizzily
with the awareness that one is not just one's
facticity: one's class, what one has been, one's
body, etc. One may be brought out of this
vertigo to some degree by a sense of
responsibility as one recognizes the extent of
one's freedom and that one is without excuse. He
or she must not, however, allow this sense of
responsibility to pull him, or her back into the
serious. In particular, he or she must resist
the temptation to take his own past decisions as
irrevocably binding him or her in the
present.
-
- To avoid the extremes of the serious and the
hypothetical, a certain combination of
playfulness and boredom seems necessary. An
individual needs to be able to regard past
choices with a detachment that always enables
one to question and to reexamine them, and one
even needs to encourage oneself constantly to do
so. At the same time, one must be able to carry
through on at least some of one's projects, even
though he or she may realize that he or she has
the freedom (and often may choose) not to do
so.
-
- Repetition has its proper place in the
sphere of the ethical, and Kierkegaard's Judge
William recognizes this. If the serious is to be
avoided, though, this repetition must be
undertaken with an attitude less serious than
that of Judge William: it must involve something
like the spirit of play, though not frivolity.
In a game, one always-at least as long as one is
playing and not seriously involved (in what is
no longer a game) - retains an awareness that
one could stop the game or at any rate get out
at any point. The sense of free involvement is
paramount in play; and to the extent that it is
lacking, we are doing something other than
playing, for example, trying to win, to impress,
to gain a scholarship, to convince ourselves of
our ability. This does not mean that one cannot
play a spirited and vigorous game. Nor does it
mean that one cannot get bored and yet carry on
the game. In fact, many a game is finished in
boredom for no better reason than that it was
begun. Many a project is completed in boredom
for no better reason than that it was
undertaken.
-
- We may indeed find good and compelling
reasons to end a game or to discontinue a
project. But must we always have good reasons
for carrying through what we previously judged
to be right or even obligatory? For every "Why?"
there is a"Why not?" which may be just as
difficult to answer. Unlike the endlessly
questioning "Why?" of the Underground Man, play
and boredom do not paralyze but may allow us not
only to initiate action but also to follow it
through to completion.
-
- To play, then, is to freely engage in an
activity. Play is neither serious nor
agonizingly hypothetical. It involves both the
recognition that one is free and an affirmation
of one's subjectivity. Some sort of distance
from the activity is necessary for play. Those
who are too intimately identified with their
tasks do not play. Neither do they become bored
since it is also distance which allows the
individual to becorne bored. Given the requisite
distance, it seems impossible to rule out the
possibility of boredom wherever there is play.
Why, then, may not an authentic individual
occasionally become bored with the use of
freedom just as the aesthete becomes bored with
abstract freedom?
-
- Why should not the initial exhilaration of
the awareness of freedom seule down into the
humdrum? Everything else does; why should this
be an exception? Camus concludes that we must
imagine Sisyphus as happy as he descends to
retrieve his stone. Surely it is just as
necessary to imagine Sisyphus as at least
occasionally bored. Cannot Sisyphus yawn from
boredom as he descends to retrieve his stone at
the foot of the hill, even though he knows that
he and he alone chooses thus to resist the
meaninglessness of the universe, attempting in
his rebellion to impose a human stamp on what is
and will remain alien and inhuman? Cannot an
individual occasionally be bored as he pours
water through sieves, although he may choose
this and may deem it in the circumstances the
most important thing to do? Surely in such cases
of boredom one is bored with one's freedom and
not just with the contingency of the particular
choice (that it need not have been) nor with the
necessity of making some choice or other (in the
sense of being condemned to frecdom).
-
- There is some indication that Sartre
recognized this possibilîty in
authenticity. In Being and Nothingness, he is
very clear about the connection between play and
authenticity, noting that a special study of
play belongs to an ethics. Moreover, in Saint
Genet, Sartre presents a dialectic of
authenticity at the end of which, as he so
dramatically asserts, Genet "becomes a man" What
happens to Genet at this point, though, is
revealing. He seules down into a rather humdrum
existence; Genet the homosexual and thief
marries and takes on the responsibilities of a
family. In one sense, little remains to be said
about him; he is no longer so interesting. But
in another sense, much remains to be said, for
he has become a man, an authentic human
being.
-
- There is also the possibility- as yet
unexamined - of the bored yawn as a response to
the other. Again, Sartre's analyses suggest that
such boredom is a response to the facticity,
past, and object-side of the other. Thus,
Roquentin is bored with M. de Rollebon who,
being dead, is pure facticity, past, and
object-side. Roquentin experiences nausea, for
example, as he becomes aware of another as
having "barely a face" with "his hand like a fat
white worm in my own hand" or as he imagines the
flesh of a womans husband as "defenceless,
bloated, slobbering, vaguely obscene." Once
again, though, the completeness of Sartre's
analyses needs to be questioned. Is this all
there is to the yawn as a response to another?
Again, I think not.
-
- Surely we cannot deny that we often respond
to others as Sartre has suggested. One may
indeed experience the inhuman and alien in
another. One may feel the superfluity of the
other. One may become bored with another's
facticity, past, and object-side. For the most
part, individuals may react in bad faith to the
look of another. They may not want to assume
their responsibility for the object-sides the
other in some sense gives them. As they flee
frorn this recognition, they rnay very well not
be bored. They may be much too serious about
their undertakings.
-
- But what if someone does not flee in such
seriousness? What if he accepts his freedom and
his responsibility even for the way others see
him? Does he not then react rather differently
to the look of the other? As Sartre recognizes
in Being and Nothingness, to react in
indifference, in effect pretending that one is
not looked at, is a reaction of flight, of bad
faith. Surely, however, boredom is a very
different and often appropriate response. Sartre
considers instances of the look in which an
individual has been seen in a way he does not
wish to be seen. Even without turning to a
consideration of authentic response to the
other, we might suggest cases in which the look
of the other is not particularly threatening.
For example, even this kind of bad faith is
unmoved when the look of the other is
particularly distorting. For example, a look
will not be particularly threatening, bad faith
notwithstanding, if the one who looks is
notoriously insensitive and imperceptive and if
it is quite clear that what he or she thinks is
seen bears no resemblance whatsoever to what is
actually going on.
-
- If an indivîdual is authentic and not
fleeing freedom and responsibility, the
situation is somewhat similar. One's interest in
the other's look would be in direct proportion
to the latter's sensitivity and perceptiveness.
One must, after all, minimally recognize oneself
in what the other sees; and in the effort fully
to assume responsibility for his or her
object-side, the authentic individual has little
if anything to learn about himself or herself
frorn someone who so distorts those seen that
they are simply unable to recognize these views
of thern as in any way their objectsides.
-
- Here a response of boredorn seerns not only
expected but even most appropriate. This fact
might explain why, even in bad faith, we are so
uninterested in and unthreatened by some, even
by some who try so hard to interest or to
threaten us. Sartre himself allows that what is
threatening about the look is that the other
thercin discloses to the one scen the latter's
object-side. If one's object-side is not
disclosed by what one originally might have
taken as a look, then it no doubt was not a real
look. Although it may disclose one's object-side
in the same way as a rustling leaf, taken as an
other-looking-at-one, nevertheless the actual
look of the other may turn out to be itself no
more threatening or enticing than the leaf.
-
- Perhaps we can carry Sartre's analysis a
step further. Not only may we not be interested
in the way the other sees us, but also we may
even not be at all interested in the other's
freedom and transcendence. It may be true that
he or she organizes the world around himself or
herself just as we each organize it around
ourselves. It may very well be that the other in
some sense usurps our possibilities by subsuming
them under his or her projects. But the question
is, must we be threatened or even moderately
interested in this? May we not be bored with the
freedom and transcendence of the other?
-
- Is it just that we feel that we know in
advance what the other is going to do? That may
be a part of it, in which case boredom results
from others' predictability. This looks once
again like we are bored with something
resembling or closely connected with others'
facticity, their past, and the way we see them,
rather than with their freedom and
transcendence. But others may truly do the
unexpected, and we may still be bored with them.
They may be reeling about with the anxiety of
facing their own freedom; a world as it were of
possibilities may be confronting them; and we
may nevertheless be bored with them. Whereas we
may be fascinated with the cyclical patterns in
nature, the repetitions in animal life, and even
the spinning of a top, we may be bored to tears
by a human freedom, unpredictable though it may
be.
-
- A final point needs to be made in connection
with boredom as a response to another,
especially in its physical manifestation of the
yawn. Sartre has a great deal to say in general
about holes. Man himself, according to Sartre,
is a hole in being, and this accounts for the
all too human fascination with holes and for
man's constant striving to fill them. In a
philosophy so concerned with the significance of
holes, it is remarkable that we do not find any
mention of the yawn - particularly the yawn as a
response to another - as a hole. This is even
more remarkable when one attends to the actual
role a yawn may play in the encounter between
the self and another.
-
- Here indeed is an interesting hole, one
that, as we have seen, can in a sense swallow
the look of the other. Someone looks at another.
The latter yawns. The look of the first is lost:
where he or she had tried to objectify the
other, there is no other to be objectified. The
other has removed himself or herself; he or she
is no longer there at all. What remains are
tongue, lips, and tonsils. The yawner has
removed himself or herself from the antagonism
directed toward him or her, from the circle into
which the look might have precipitated the two
of them. Thus, the yawn enables one to break out
of the circle of relations described by Sartre
in Being and Nothingness. To be bored is to
enjoy a distance from both the threat and the
temptation of the look. In boredom, one realizes
one's own free involvement in the situation, and
this realization releases the magical hold of
the other.
-
- Thus, it seems, the yawn is a hole with a
difference, for it can swallow the subjectivity
of the look. At the same time, it does not
invite filling the way that other holes do.
There is something empty and yet full about the
yawn. It is indeed a hole but one that is full
and expressive: it is a hole that overflows
itself. Sartre indicates this, I believe, by
frequently connecting the bored yawn with tears:
"I give such a big yawn that tears come into my
eyes," and "From time to time I yawn so widely
that tears roll down my cheeks."
-
- I conclude, then, that the examined life of
an existentialist may not and need not always be
as exciting as those of us threatened by the
recognition of freedom might think. This does
not, however, mean that an authentic life is not
worth living. It only means that we can become
bored with our own freedom and with that of
others and that boredom, or at least the
constant possibility thereof, must play an
important role in an ethics of authenticity
developing out of the thought of Sartre.
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