Abstract
The essay contributes to the philosophical literature on emotions by advancing a detailed analysis of jadedness and by investigating whether jadedness can be subject to the various standards that are often thought to apply to our emotional states. The essay argues that jadedness is the affective experience of weariness, lack of care, and mild disdain with some object, and that it crucially involves the realisation that such an object was previously, but is no longer, significant to us. On the basis of such a characterisation, jadedness is shown to be an affective call to restructure our commitments and values in a manner that we no longer assign any kind of significance to its object. Precisely because of its potential to affect our lives in such a fashion, jadedness is shown to carry philosophical, psychological, and even social importance.
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Notes
The search was conducted on March 11, 2022.
Literature and TV contain numerous examples of fictional characters who have become jaded by the things that most of us aspire to achieve. The unnamed narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s marvelous My Year of Rest and Relaxation has ostensibly everything and yet she is jaded with and even repulsed by her life and relations. The characters of Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero seem to feel the same way. And in HBO’s Euphoria, Rue’s drug addiction appears to be driven by her jadedness with life. In these and other works, it is often hard to distinguish clearly jadedness from alienation, ennui, and depression. All the same, jadedness is undeniably a significant part of the affective background of the lives of these characters.
For example, it is possible for jadedness to arise due to some change in one’s neurophysiology or because of brain stimulation. Damasio tells the story of a Parkinson’s patient who came to experience intense sadness during a treatment session that involved deep brain stimulation (i.e., the use of implanted electrodes and electrical stimulation either to treat neurological conditions or to alleviate their symptoms) (Damasio 2003, 65–70). The patient was surprised by the emergence of sadness and could not explain it. See also Bortolotti & Aliffi (2021).
The link between past experiences and jadedness is also found in dictionary definitions of “jaded.” For instance, the Oxford English Dictionary defines “jaded” as the state of being “dull or sated by continual use or indulgence.” The provided definition entails that the object of jadedness is something to which we have been previously exposed.
My discussion of this type of jadedness owes much to an anonymous referee’s comments concerning the possibility of jadedness arising out of a personal change that is not necessarily connected to past negative experiences with jadedness’ object.
Discussions of whether a greatly prolonged or even immortal existence would necessarily be boring can also provide insight into how and when certain objects of engagement might become boring after prolonged interaction with them. Read, e.g., Fischer (1994), Fischer & Mitchell-Yellin (2014), Rosati (2013), Williams (1973), and Wisnewski (2005).
As an anonymous reviewer rightly points out, in our determination of the reasonableness or unreasonableness of one’s jadedness, we also need to take into consideration differences in personality traits. Perhaps some individuals are more likely to be jaded than others, and that might not be because they have somehow committed a fallacious or rash inference but because of how they are disposed to engage with and think about their potential objects of jadedness.
Herman Melville’s Bartleby appears to embody, almost perfectly, this type of wide jadedness. Nothing in his world is significant to him; nothing is worth his attention and time; and everything is, in some sense, beneath him. All the same, and at least until the very end, Bartleby hasn’t given up on life. As it is revealed by his mantra (“I would prefer not to”), he still has desires (or preferences), even though nothing in the world seems to be capable of fulfilling them. Importantly, his past experience as clerk in the Dead Letter Office could even explain how his jadedness came to be. The burning of the undelivered letters, one might imagine, has revealed to Bartleby that the social, economic, and political institutions that surround him violate some of his deeply held expectations and desires.
Indeed, readers familiar with the phenomenological tradition might be wondering whether wide jadedness is akin to a Heideggerian Stimmung (Heidegger 1962). That is to say, is wide jadedness an affective mode of existence that both constitutes and discloses the manner in which we find ourselves in the world of our practical, personal, and social concerns? Although the exact character of wide jadedness would need to be further explored, there appear to be important similarities between the two phenomena (or constructs). First, just like phenomenological moods, wide jadedness is an enduring and all-encompassing affective condition that alters in fundamental respects our relationship to the world. Second, both are assumed to have a crucial revelatory function. Phenomenological moods are said to be the background horizon against which features of our ourselves and of the world are made potentially present to us, often in salient ways (Elpidorou & Freeman 2015; Freeman 2014; Guignon 1984; Ratcliffe 2013). Wide jadedness also possesses this feature: in wide jadedness it is the world itself (and not a specific object) that is revealed to us as a potential threat to our eudaimonic well-being. The world was, but no longer is, a match for our projects and concerns.
Having said that, it is not unreasonable to expect important differences between, on the one hand, trait boredom or existential boredom and, on the other hand, wide jadedness. Such forms of boredom could potentially render a subject completely indifferent to their world. If indeed they are bored by everything, then nothing whatsoever matters or concerns them. This type of complete withdrawal of significance and mattering has even led some to claim that boredom has the potential to strip away one’s identity-giving characteristics (Heidegger 1995): without any projects or values, we simply cannot define ourselves. In contrast, in wide jadedness, the experiencing subject still remains an individual: one’s projects and values matter to oneself, and it is this continued mattering that makes wide jadedness possible. To wit, we are jaded with the world because the opportunities that the world affords us are no longer conducive to our current goals, aims, desires, and values. In wide jadedness, one has not given up on the view that the world is a source of meaning and value. The world continues to carry meaning and value, just not the right sort of meaning and value. Because of that, I think wide jadedness should be understood as an affective refusal to go along with the world (and the systems of values and meanings that it currently offers). To put it differently, wide jadedness is a form of passive resistance, and not a form of apathy or surrender.
Another but more contentious example of an emotion that appears to behave like jadedness is jealousy (Farrell 1980). In typical cases of jealousy, we experience jealously only if we have a past with the object of our concern (or love).
The requirement that sentiments are multi-track as opposed to single-track dispositions is necessary in order to distinguish sentiments from dispositional emotions. (The distinction between single-track and multi-track disposition is presented in Deonna & Teroni 2012, 8–9). Specifically, single-track dispositions are dispositions that involve only a single emotion. For example, the disposition to be disgusted by rotting flesh is a single-track disposition because every time it becomes actualised it gives rise to the same emotion—disgust. Multi-track dispositions are dispositions that give rise to a variety of emotions, feelings, desires, and beliefs when actualised. Furthermore, there is no requirement that such dispositions must give rise to the same emotion or feeling every time they become actualised. If romantic love is a multi-track disposition, then romantic love would sometimes be expressed (or actualised) in the form of physical attraction and care and other times in the form of frustration or jealousy.
There is a non-epistemic sense of justification in the offing. Whereas an emotional state is epistemically justified if it is based on relevant evidence, it can be non-epistemically justified (or causally justified) if it is the outcome of antecedent events that can causally explain the current presence of the state. For example, one’s fear of dogs might be causally justifiable insofar as the person has had a previous traumatic experience with them. Both notions of justification can help us make sense the presence of our affective states. For present purposes, I focus only on the epistemic variety of justification.
As it was stated in note 8, it is important to keep in mind the role that various personality traits might play in the emergence of jadedness, especially if we have reasons to think that such personality traits are not reliable sources of accurate attitudes concerning the objects of jadedness. A subject, for example, who is disposed to be overly optimistic about what the various social, economic, and political institutions can offer might be more resistant to jadedness than some other subject who lacks this disposition—despite negative experiences with those institutions, the optimist subject expects that such institutions will at some point deliver the goods that they promised.
I would like to express my gratitude to the two anonymous referees who have read and extensively commented on previous versions of this paper. I would also like to thank my colleague John Gibson for the many lengthy conversations that we had on the topic of jadedness and for his support and encouragement when I was working on this project.
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Elpidorou, A. Jadedness: A philosophical analysis. Philos Stud 180, 567–590 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01911-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01911-5
Keywords
- Jadedness
- Boredom
- Weariness
- Affect
- Emotion
- Formal object
- Normativity