Quotation
Last reviewed:
“Boredom is the root of all evil.”
Søren Kierkegaard · Existentialism (forerunner) · Modern · 1843
What does it mean?
Boredom, not idleness, is the root of all evil, says the aesthete. Work is recommended against idleness, and he thinks that recommendation misses the disease. The rotation method, changing the crops of pleasure, is his proposed cure, and it is a way of not becoming a self. A rival reading takes the sentence as Kierkegaard's moral psychology, a signed claim that boredom causes wickedness. The voice is a character's. Another reading hears a defence of distraction. He is diagnosing a life that cannot rest without fabricating stimulus.
Did Søren Kierkegaard really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Hong and Hong. The sentence is the aesthete's, in the essay usually titled 'The Rotation of Crops', though readers also meet the mood among the diapsalmata. Idleness, he says, is not the root. Boredom is. Confirm the essay before a page number.
Where it comes from
Either/Or I, in the Hong and Hong translation
Approximate date: 1843.
How to use it
A bank of screens in a shared house in Leeds is justified as the cure for an evening that might otherwise be empty. The essay thinks that cure is the disease learning to farm itself. You need not accept the theology waiting offstage to notice the difference between rest and rotation. The difference is what the sentence is for.
A mindset reading
Do not promote a pseudonym's joke into a doctrine of sin. Do not ignore it either. The aesthete sees something about emptiness that the ethical voice has to answer rather than merely scold.
Understand the philosophy
Either/Or I is 1843, the aesthetic life. The boredom essay is its practical method. Hong and Hong are the English. A page citation should wait on the essay title, which this card flags rather than invents.
- self
- ethics
- mind
FAQ
What does it mean?
Boredom, not idleness, is the root of all evil, says the aesthete. Work is recommended against idleness, and he thinks that recommendation misses the disease. The rotation method, changing the crops of pleasure, is his proposed cure, and it is a way of not becoming a self. A rival reading takes the sentence as Kierkegaard's moral psychology, a signed claim that boredom causes wickedness. The voice is a character's. Another reading hears a defence of distraction. He is diagnosing a life that cannot rest without fabricating stimulus.
Did Søren Kierkegaard really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Hong and Hong. The sentence is the aesthete's, in the essay usually titled 'The Rotation of Crops', though readers also meet the mood among the diapsalmata. Idleness, he says, is not the root. Boredom is. Confirm the essay before a page number.
Which work is it in?
Either/Or I, in the Hong and Hong translation Approximate date: 1843.