El aburrimiento como presión selectiva en Hans Blumenberg

Abstract

Boredom is currently conceived as a phenomenon that affects humans from a psychological pathological view whereas a minority of thinkers are directing their efforts to stress its most positive aspects on the contrary: the compulsion to action. Understanding of boredom as a motor that drives the movement toward novelty seeking and stillness prevention was already present in the philosophy of the past century and especially in Hans Blumenberg¿s publications. However, the treatment from its anthropogenetic nature has been relegated to a series of unpublished and inaccesible documents which rest in the Nachlaß of the German philosopher. Those return to the study of the lives of our earliest ancestors to show that boredom may have been present at the origins of our species and may have been a condition of possibility of the development of some aspects that characterize us such us language and abstract thought. This line so far unknown can help reinforce and complement the proposals of the researchers in this attempt to defend the inescapable character of boredom from an optimistic view as if it were a selective pressure.