Journal of Boredom
Studies (ISSN 2990-2525)
Issue 4, 2026, pp. 1–18
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22276629
https://www.boredomsociety.com/jbs
Romantic Boredom in
Fantasies about Art (Phantasien über die Kunst) and “The
Rune Mountain” (“Der Runenberg”). A Study of Affinities with Schopenhauer’s Philosophy
of Art and Existence
Julia
Köwitz García
Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
https://orcid.org/0009-0007-7194-4040
How to cite
this paper: Köwitz García, J. (2026). Romantic
Boredom in Fantasies about Art (Phantasien über die Kunst) and
“The Rune Mountain” (“Der Runenberg”). A Study of Affinities with
Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Art and Existence. Journal of Boredom Studies, 4. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22276629
Abstract: The present
article aims to analyze the literary representations of boredom in a selection
of Romantic works—Fantasies about Art by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder
and Ludwig Tieck, and “The Rune Mountain” by the latter—as well as the
main themes with which these are bound up, examining to what extent it can
actually be spoken of possible affinities with Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art
and existence. Following Ros Velasco’s research on boredom, it will be found
that the most frequent typology within the Romantic period consists in
situation-dependent and chronic boredom, as well as in its profound variant,
fact which reflects the Romantic character’s experience of crisis and
existential emptiness towards an increasingly mechanized perception of time. A
little part of the Romantic representations of boredom will reflect aesthetic
ideas defended also by Arthur Schopenhauer in his magnum opus The World as
Will and Representation. Moreover, it will be found that Schopenhauer’s
different backdrop concerning the thing in itself compared to the view of the Romantics
determines significantly the narrow segment of affinities between the writers
and the philosopher. That being said, it is also true that 1) both Schopenhauer
and the Romantics gave a special status to art and, more specifically, music—an
important affinity which appears to be bound up with boredom in “A Wondrous Oriental
Fairy Tale of a Naked Saint”; and 2) the representations of boredom help to
elucidate the complex amalgam of ideas that were circulating around 1800—for
example, Tieck’s mystical and philosophical influences.
Keywords: Situation-dependent
and chronic boredom, profound boredom, Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Heinrich
Wackenroder, Arthur Schopenhauer, aesthetic experience.
1. Introduction
This article aims to
trace the literary representation of boredom in German Romanticism and its
affinities with Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art through the following
selection of works: Fantasies about Art (Phantasien über die Kunst)
written by Wackenroder and Tieck, and “The Rune Mountain” (“Der
Runenberg”) by Tieck. Starting from the research question ‘to what extent do
the literary representations of boredom in early Romanticism anticipate themes
that later appear in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art and existence?,’ both
affinities and differences between the writers and the philosopher will be
displayed, in order to gain insight into the representations of boredom around
1800.
Given the important differences between Schopenhauer’s
theory of the will and the Romantic’s longing for the Absolute, aesthetics
affinities between the two have to be considered partially: whenever the
literary representation of boredom appears in relationship with an idea which
seems akin to Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, this given supposition will carefully
be presented in its full context. This article is split into four main
sections: at first, this introduction (1.)—which briefly explains the scope and
division of the article—and a second section (2.), which includes both the
methodology (2.2.) as well as the historical contextualization of boredom
(2.1), which additionally explores the different perspectives on the ‘thing in itself’
by Schopenhauer and the Romantics, and its repercussions with regard to their
aesthetic affinities and differences. Given the important role of music in both
Schopenhauer’s thought and the Romantic oeuvre, the third section (3.1) begins
with a comparative study of the two, in order to introduce the reader into the
fundamental point. This is followed by the analysis of the Romantic oeuvre in
itself: the different literary representations of boredom will be examined to
find out to what extent, like the hypothesis states, those representations
anticipate (or not) themes which later appear in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of
art and existence. Thus, the main part of the third section contains two
subsections: (3.2.) is dedicated to Wackenroder’s and Tieck’s Phantasien
über die Kunst, the other (3.3.) is devoted to Tieck’s literary fairy tale “Der
Runenberg.” Finally (4.), the last part of the article describes the
conclusions drawn from the analysis.
2. Theory
2.1. Historical Contextualization
During the nineteenth
century, the term Langeweile attracted the interest of many German
philosophers and writers. As Ros Velasco (2017) points
out, it was etymologically linked to a particular perception of time, “which
seems to stretch on too long, which is experienced as empty, in which nothing
happens, stagnant and leaden” (p. 211, a. trans.). But before discussing the
temporal perception of boredom, note the interesting relationship that Kant (1798) establishes between positive pain and negative pain in his Anthropologie
in pragmatischer Hinsicht. As Ros Velasco (2021a)
explains in her article “Kantian Lange Weile Within the Contemporary Psychology
of Boredom,” positive pain constitutes, for Kant, the driving force that
guarantees the normal life cycle of human beings, thus immersing them in a wave
oscillating between two peaks of pleasure and pain. In Kant’s (1798) own words: “Nor can one pleasure immediately follow another; rather,
pain must intervene between one and the other. They are small inhibitions of
the life force” (p. 155, a. trans). Boredom arises when there is no positive
pain to fuel that cycle; that is why it is an
emotional
void which a person accustomed to emotional fluctuations perceives within
themselves—whilst striving to fill that void with something to satisfy their
life force—often affects them to such an extent that they feel compelled to do
something to their own detriment rather than do nothing at all (Kant, 1798,
p. 172, a. trans).
The
bored person therefore perceives time as passing slowly whilst they are bored,
but, looking back, precisely because those moments were meaningless, that time
has gone by very quickly (Ros Velasco, 2021a).
According to Kant (1798), boredom must be countered through
work, as it is through work that the pleasure of rest emerges by contrast (see p.
172). Of particular interest here is Ros Velasco’s (2021a)
observation regarding the “social, cultural and economic context […] of the
Enlightenment, in which people are unable to find satisfaction” (p. 178, a.
trans). This is precisely the situation faced by Romantic artists at the turn
of the century, which is often reflected in characters portrayed as geniuses
bored by a life that is temporarily rationalized, yet devoid of meaning for
them (Ros Velasco, 2022, 2026). Such
is the case, for example, with the profound boredom of the character of the
naked saint in the Phantasien, as well as with the figure of Christian
in “Der Runenberg,” who suffers from situation-dependent and chronic boredom.
On the other hand, the literary portrayal of the bored artist (especially
in Tieck) sometimes also becomes a symbol “of the cultural exhaustion and weariness
that Tieck and his contemporaries experienced” (Ros Velasco, 2022, p. 125, 2026, p. 82), that is to say, a
weariness with the then-common practice of dissecting the self.
This concludes our look at the Kantian view on boredom on
the one hand and the Romantic one on the other. What place does boredom have in
Schopenhauer’s philosophy? While the German romantic writers do intentionally
place their invented and talented artists in a boring situation, Schopenhauer (1897) describes the genius as an individual whose
intellectual and contemplative capacities make him less prone to boredom.
Furthermore, he explains that the aesthetically sensitive depend much less on
external stimuli, so that they spend their time engaged in “idealities,” which
are “inexhaustible” (Schopenhauer, 1897, p. 47).
As opposed to the “principle of sufficient reason” (PSR), the genius can devote
himself, in certain moments of inspiration, to contemplation, because his
essence “lies precisely in the predominant capacity for such [the pure]
contemplation” (Schopenhauer, 1844a, p.
209, a. trans). By doing so the object “of its contemplation” detaches from the
relationships it usually has to the striving self, so that it “becomes […] a
representative of the whole [that is to say, of the stream of the world’s
course]” (Schopenhauer, 1844a, p. 209, a. trans). Thus, the
genius is able to perceive Ideas and communicate them in the work of art, in
which “The artist lets us look into the world through his eyes” (Schopenhauer, 1844a, p. 220, a. trans). Far from those artistic
occupations, boredom arises within the blind striving-cycle of the will:
Desire and
striving constitute the very essence of [human] existence, entirely comparable
to an unquenchable thirst. The basis of all desire, however, is need, lack—and
thus pain—to which he is consequently subject from the very outset and by
virtue of his very nature. If, on the other hand, he lacks objects of
desire—because too easy a satisfaction immediately takes them away from him
again—then he is overcome by a terrible emptiness and boredom: that is to say,
his very nature and existence become an unbearable burden to him. His life thus
swings, like a pendulum, back and forth between pain and boredom.
(Schopenhauer, 1844a, pp. 351–352, a. trans).
This passage from The World as
Will and Representation suggests that human life is based on a constant
oscillation between suffering and boredom, in a cycle without end or
transcendence. In the Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, Schopenhauer (1897) appears to explain two levels in this regard:
firstly, the world of necessity, in which the individual does everything
possible to escape pain; and secondly, an existence in which basic needs are
finally met, but which remains subjectively unsatisfied if the subject lacks “intellectual
needs”:
The great
affliction of all philistines is that they have no interest in ideas, and that,
to escape being bored, they are in constant need of realities. But realities
are either unsatisfactory or dangerous; when they lose their interest, they
become fatiguing. But the ideal world is illimitable and calm, something afar
from the sphere of our sorrow (p. 47).
The philistine tries to escape boredom through, so to
speak, worldly pursuits, which nevertheless do not eliminate boredom, because
his own intellect “is absolutely nothing more than the means by which the
motive power of the will is put into force” (Schopenhauer, 1897, p. 27). By contrast, “the ideal world is
boundless” and therefore only “the inexhaustible activity of thought” protects
against the “inner vacuity of soul” (Schopenhauer, 1897, p. 24). The fact that in the works of Tieck
and many other Romantic writers boredom is not experienced by a philistine, but
by an artist in “constant self-observation” (Ros Velasco, 2022, p. 128, 2026, p. 84), seems to reflect the
distinct framework (distinct from Schopenhauer’s) within which Romantic
literature found expression; all the more so when one bears in mind that it was
no stranger to post-Kantian philosophy (Köpke, 1855). In
this regard, as Safranski (2025) explains, the ideas which
Schopenhauer was seeking to develop and organize into a system of thought of
his own differed entirely from those of Fichte and Schelling; for, unlike them,
Schopenhauer does not interpret Kant as holding that the thing-in-itself must
be constructed by the subject of knowledge. Schopenhauer’s radically different
philosophy required, for its development, sources other than those of the
present. Although the German Romantic writers immersed themselves in Hindu
wisdom through Herder, their interpretation inevitably circled back to the
Absolute and sought, in the delights of Eastern imagery, aesthetic inspiration
for the longed-for reconciliation between the self and the world. The context
in which Schopenhauer reads Hindu philosophy is different: he is developing a
philosophy whose roots lie in the suffering of the world, finding in the
Upanishads interesting echoes of his own duality of the world (Safranski, 2025).
Taking all this into account, literary depictions of
boredom in Romanticism are set against a different backdrop to that of
Schopenhauer’s philosophy, as the latter is framed within a concept of
immanence that the others are unfamiliar with. Moreover, in his Kritik der
kantischen Philosophie, Schopenhauer (1844a) refers
to the search for the Absolute as an attempt “halfway between a plea and a
challenge” [“halb erbettelt, halb ertrokt”] to recover the cosmological
argument in favor of the existence of God, even though the latter has “lost all
his rights […] as a result of the judgement passed on him by Kant” (p. 544, a.
trans.). It is equally necessary to clarify the philosopher’s position on God
as compared with that held by certain Romantic writers such as Tieck. The
following anecdote recounted by Karl von Holtei (2017) in his Nachlese.
Erzählungen und Plaudereien illustrates this more clearly:
In Dresden, a
few years ago, I met the aforementioned eccentric [Arthur] at Tieck’s house […]
Discussions had arisen between him and Tieck concerning various philosophical
systems; little by little this led, via Jacobi—whom Tieck held in high
regard—to religious disputes; and when Tieck spoke of God, Schopenhauer leapt
up as if stung by a tarantula and, whirling about like a whirlwind, shouted
with a sardonic laugh: “What? Do you need a God?” A scream that Tieck would
never forget for the rest of his days (p. 42, a. trans.).
Although
Tieck was never a staunch supporter of either Protestantism or Catholicism
(Köpke, 1855), his curious spirit, perpetually
open to all manner of ideas, brought him closer to God than Schopenhauer could
ever be. It is essential to bear these differences in mind when analyzing
representations of boredom and their possible affinities (or divergences) with
Schopenhauer’s philosophy.
2.2. Methodology: Ros
Velasco’s Theory of Boredom
Considering the strong
historical component of this research and the importance of updating and
contrasting the literary motif with the latest studies on boredom, the
methodology of Ros Velasco (2022, 2026) will be
followed, since her theoretical framework unifies the historical component of
boredom with an updated analysis, allowing both the historical component of
boredom and its present to be assimilated into the same approach or
perspective. In her book The Disease of Boredom, Ros Velasco (2022, 2026) sets out the following fundamental
types:
Table 1. Ros
Velasco’s boredom typology synthesized (see Ros Velasco, 2022, pp. 30–31, 2026, p. 7–8).
|
(1) Situation-dependent and transient
boredom |
Whereby a particular situation
bores an individual or a group of individuals, who will cease to be bored as
soon as that situation ends. |
|
(2) Individual-dependent and chronic
boredom |
Which affects only individuals who
are highly prone to boredom, whether due to their personality or a mental
disorder. In this case, the boredom never ceases: the individual is always
bored. |
|
(3) Situation-dependent and chronic
boredom (or chronified situation-dependent boredom). |
Caused (individually or
collectively) by a specific context that does not change. It can lead to
strong behaviors and reactions in an attempt to put an end to the situation
causing the boredom. |
|
(4) Deep boredom. |
Which consists either of
chronified situation-dependent boredom
or chronic boredom that persists over time. It can be experienced both by an
individual alone and by a group. |
With
the exception of (1), the other types are dysfunctional or pathological, as in
such cases the individual (or the group, where applicable) is unable to take
action to combat the boredom they are experiencing (Ros Velasco, 2022, 2026). Ros Velasco (2021b) therefore distinguishes two levels: a first stage, which involves
becoming aware of the situation, and a second level, in which the individual
(or group) takes action to put an end to the boredom that is consuming them.
Despite the negative context in which boredom may arise, Ros Velasco (2022, 2026) clarifies that, in most cases, it
is not a disease, but rather “a symptom, a sign of dissatisfaction and
contempt for what is before us” (p. 26, p. 4). The cases in which it can indeed
be considered a pathology are those that have become chronic, where the
individual or group is unable to take action to put an end to it (Ros Velasco, 2021b).
Hence,
in a particularly interesting way, it can be spoken of “situation-dependent and
chronic boredom” (Ros Velasco, 2022, p. 28, 2026, p. 6)
in those prototypical Romantic characters who possess the traits and
dispositions of the genius and so they seem to feel weary because of the
ordinary, bourgeois world in which they are compelled to live. Thus, boredom is
profoundly rooted in the prevailing social order, and so its literary
representation seems to serve as a source of criticism, a mirror reflecting a
backward social and aesthetical context that still does not understand the
enthusiastic mood of romantic inner inspiration.
Framed
by the substitution of natural time for productive time (Ros Velasco, 2025), both the chronified situation-dependent and the profound
boredom of the Romantic genius signal not only the vital uneasiness, but also
an aesthetic dilemma: the romantic artist feels misunderstood by his
time-schematized environment, which does not share his aesthetic enthusiasm.
As
for the chosen corpus—comprising the work co-authored by Wackenroder and Tieck,
Phantasien über die Kunst, and Tieck’s “Der Runenberg”—its selection
stems from two possible, interesting indications of affinity that will be
explored in relation to boredom: (1) the ideas concerning art and music
contained in the Phantasien, which are strikingly reminiscent of
Schopenhauer’s aesthetics; and (2) the study and reading, by both Tieck and
Schopenhauer, of the mystic Jakob Böhme, who is thought to have influenced
Tieck whilst he was writing “Der Runenberg” (Köpke, 1855).
It is
assumed that these points merely concern possible affinities between the
philosopher and the writers, so that it is therefore necessary to analyze each
of their ideas separately, in order to ultimately determine whether or not a
similarity actually exists. It is interesting to note the difference between
the ideas to be analyzed in the Phantasien and those to be examined in “Der
Runenberg”: Phantasien über die Kunst contains descriptions of art that
appear to bear a resemblance to Schopenhauer’s own aesthetic ideas, as set out
in The World as Will and Representation, such as the notion of art as an
agent capable of glimpsing the world’s most intimate mysteries, or the
momentary solace it provides amidst the painful and mundane hustle and bustle
of life. Written at a time of youthful artistic ecstasy, the two friends,
Wackenroder and Tieck, captured in Phantasien the essence of an
aesthetic founded on enthusiasm and feeling, which they both forged during
their travels to Nuremberg, Bamberg, Pommersfelden, and the Fichtelgebirge.
Raised in the Protestant faith, there they encountered images of Catholic
devotion, which captivated and intrigued them (Paulin, 1987). It is from those impressions that they will distil their well-known “religion
of art” (in German Kunstreligion) (Paulin, 1987, p. 65,
a. trans.), banishing the Enlightenment’s affinity for the concepts and forms
of reason. In contrast to the individual cut off from the present, the lives of
sixteenth-century geniuses, such as Albrecht Dürer, “do not look to the right
or to the left, but act as if there were no other way to act” (Tieck &
Wackenroder, 1799, p. 27, a. trans.). The work will
therefore be devoted to conveying, with feeling, what the artist can achieve if
he devotes himself entirely to art—not even doubts will be enough to dampen the
enthusiasm.
Throughout
this article, aesthetic similarities—as well as differences—between the writers
and the philosopher in relation to the literary motif of boredom will be
explored. It is interesting to note that, despite their different contexts, the
Phantasien can be regarded as to the literature of the period what The
World as Will and Representation was to the philosophy of its time: a
radically new proposal in its field, as Wackenroder laid the foundations there
for an original aesthetic, which was strongly influenced by the art historian
Johann Dominicus Fiorillo (Littlejohns, 1996).
On
the other hand, adding another work by Tieck to the corpus is particularly
interesting given that the author—ambiguous by definition—at the time he wrote
the story analyzed here, “Der Runenberg,” was engrossed in reading the mystic
Jakob Böhme (Köpke, 1855), whom Schopenhauer also read and
in whose writings the philosopher found certain parallels with his own ideas
concerning the will (Pérez Cornejo, 2004).
Given
the central role played by boredom in the story—for it is boredom, and nothing
else, that sets the protagonist in motion, setting the entire plot in
motion—and its echoes in Böhme, one might well ask whether there is any
affinity in his work with Schopenhauerian themes; this will be the subject of
section 3.2.
The
two works differ from one another in the distinct vision of nature they offer:
the description of nature in Phantasien bears no resemblance to the
gloom of the mountains in “Der Runenberg.” From this, a possible and
interesting shift can be inferred: the lack of a stable principle, which had
already been dragging Berglinger into a profound boredom—but which ultimately
dissolved once more into the conviction that “one must reach out to the great,
to art” (Tieck & Wackenroder, 1799, pp. 179–180,
a. trans.)—seems to reach a climax in “Der Runenberg”: the story of its
protagonist, Christian, reflects the incompatibility between life and art.
The
prototypical romantic ambiguity underlying both works raises the question of
whether what had hitherto been believed to be immutable might in fact be an
intimate reflection of reality. At a certain point, the Romantic artist
encounters the unknown, however much his inner self may reflect on his own
activity. It is within this existential unknown that, in certain passages,
music enters the scene, embodying a “celestial spirit” unmediated by reason
(Tieck & Wackenroder, 1799, p. 186,
a. trans.).
3. Analysis
3.1. Schopenhauer’s Conception
of Music Compared with the Romantic View
To gain a better
understanding of the relationship between boredom and certain aesthetic ideas
in the Phantasien, it is necessary first to familiarize oneself with Schopenhauer’s
ideas on music, as well as the Romantic view regarding this art form. For
Schopenhauer (1844a), the peak of all the arts is
music, since, unlike the others, it requires no medium—music does not
objectivate the will through the Ideas; music is “an immediate objectification
and reflection of the whole Will” (p. 292, a trans.). The following fragment of
The World as Will and Representation explains it as follows:
The
[Platonic] Ideas are the adequate objectification of the will: the purpose of
all other arts is to stimulate the recognition of these ideas through the
representation of individual things (for such are, after all, the works of art
themselves), which is possible only through a corresponding change in the
perceiving subject. They all, therefore, objectify the will only indirectly,
namely through ideas: and since our world is nothing but the appearance
of ideas in multiplicity, through access to the principium individuationis (the
form of knowledge possible of the individual as such); music, since it
passes over the Ideas, is also entirely independent of the appearing world;
it ignores it altogether and could, so to speak, still exist even if
the world did not exist at all: something which cannot be said of the other
arts. For music is, in fact, an immediate objectification and reflection of the
whole Will, just as the world itself is, indeed as the Ideas are, whose
multiplied appearance constitutes the world of individual things (Schopenhauer,
1844a, pp. 291–292, a. trans.).
Without
forgetting the important difference between Schopenhauer and the Romantics that
the former’s philosophy roots in will’s immanence while the latter in the
Absolute, both of them recall the superiority of music by referring to its
ethereal character and its direct relationship with the essence of the world.
Schopenhauer’s (1844a) emphasis on music’s independency
from the phenomenal world since “it passes over the Ideas” so that it “could […]
still exist even if there were no world at all” (p. 292, a. trans.) suggests an
affinity with the Romantic depictions of absolute music:
In
instrumental music, however, art is independent and free; it lays down its own
laws, it fantasizes playfully and without purpose, and yet it fulfils and
attains the highest; it follows its dark impulses entirely, and expresses the
deepest, most marvelous things through its frolics (Tieck & Wackenroder, 1799, p. 261, a.
trans.).
In
their Phantasien, Tieck and Wackenroder conceived and described music as
an autonomous realm, idea which had gained force within some artistic circles
at the time. In the late 1700’s it was being claimed that the superiority of
music had to do with its capacity to express the unconcreted (Wiesenfeld, 2022). At the same time, music was somehow
mysteriously bound up with life, since, when hearing a music piece, the
composter Joseph Berglinger is absorbed by “the sensation of a marvelous blend
of joy and sadness […] a feeling we experience very often in life and which no
art form other than music is capable of expressing” (Tieck & Wackenroder, 1819, p. 167, a. trans.). At a first glance, it
might seem that there is an affinity with the following description of melody
put by Schopenhauer (1844a, p. 294, a. trans.): “[The melody]
depicts every emotion, every aspiration, every movement of the will—everything
that reason summarizes under the broad and negative concept of feeling and
cannot incorporate any further into its abstractions.” At this point, though,
the affinity with Schopenhauer remains superficial, since the narrator in the Phantasien
refers to music as a heavenly power: “What words can I use to express that
heavenly music, with its rich tones and its hearth-warming echoes, exerts over
our hearts? It enters straight into the soul with its angelic presence” (Tieck &
Wackenroder, 1799, p. 221, a. trans.). Both
Schopenhauer and the Romantics describe music by means of its closeness to the ‘thing
in itself,’ but for each of them the ‘thing in itself’ is completely different.
Under this light, it must be stated the important fact that the literary
representations of boredom which anticipate themes in Schopenhauer’s
aesthetics—for example, the profound boredom of the naked saint in the Phantasien—do
so just partially, because of this gap between their existential worldviews.
3.2. Literary Representations
of Boredom and Aesthetic Ideas Linked with Them in Phantasien über die Kunst.
Affinities (and Differences) with Schopenhauer’s Thought
Tieck and Wackenroder’s Phantasien
sometimes seem to reflect a kind of boredom that arises as a result of the
discrepancy between the artist’s inner world and the external world, the latter
being alien to him. The tale “A Wondrous Oriental Fairy Tale of a Naked Saint”
(“Ein wunderbares morgenländisches Märchen von einem nackten Heiligen”)
portrays this discord: the saint is a victim of the ‘monster of time,’ which
plunges him into profound boredom (Ros Velasco, 2022, 2026), which leads him to do all sorts of crazy things:
This strange
creature found no rest, day or night, in his dwelling; it always seemed to him
that he could hear, ceaselessly in his ears, the wheel of time turning at a
dizzying pace. Faced with that din, it could do nothing, nor undertake anything
[…] It was enraged to see that the travelers who came to it on pilgrimage stood
there in complete tranquillity, observing it, or that from time to time they
walked about and spoke amongst themselves. It trembled with fury and showed
them the unstoppable turning of the eternal wheel, the monotonous and rhythmic
roar of time (Tieck & Wackenroder, 1799, pp. 136,
138–139, a. trans.).
The fact that the saint can no longer escape his boredom,
as well as his existence trapped in an environment that does not change but
rather always constitutes “the eternal wheel, the monotonous and rhythmic roar
of time” (Tieck & Wackenroder, 1799, p.
139), suggests that this is a chronified situation-dependent boredom prolonged
over time which therefore has become profound (Ros Velasco, 2022, 2026). After several painful and
hopeless years, one night, the sound of music coming from a lovers’ boat
suddenly redeems him from boredom: “Once, however, there was a beautiful,
moonlit summer’s night […] Ethereal music welled up from the barge into the
expanse of the heavens; sweet horns and I know not what other enchanting
instruments conjured up a floating world of sounds” (Tieck & Wackenroder, 1799, pp. 142–143, a. trans.). This liberation from
mechanical time through aesthetic time seems, however, to be merely momentary,
as the narrative leaves open the possibility that it is merely a sweet dream or
a delusion on the part of the unstable protagonist:
At the very
first sound of music and song, the whirring wheel of time had vanished from the
naked saint. It was the first sound to fall upon this wasteland; the unknown
longing was satisfied, the spell was broken, the lost genius freed from its
earthly shell. The figure of the saint had vanished; an angelic and beautiful
ghostly form, woven with a faint fragrance, floated out of the cave, stretched
its slender, yearning arms towards the sky and rose from the ground in a
dancing motion to the sound of the music (Tieck & Wackenroder, 1799, p. 145, a. trans.).
In
addition to this comes the distant setting: the escape takes place in the East.
In the narrative, therefore, it remains unclear whether the artist can free
himself from the torment of his boredom for good, not even through what was at
that time the most revered of the arts. However, it is a fact that, thanks to
music, the drudgery of everyday life has faded away for a moment. This idea of
momentary consolation provided by the aesthetic experience also appears in
Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art: aesthetic contemplation leads to a momentary
suspension of willing, and so the individual ceases to suffer for an instant.
Thus, the used terms ‘liberation,’ ‘redemption’ or ‘escape’ for the saint’s
listening experience do not define a permanent or radical break with suffering:
instead, they refer to the intensity with which he experiences the fleeting
relief. This brief solace resembles the Schopenhauerian idea of aesthetic
contemplation as a momentary suspension of willing, so it does not correspond
at all to the permanent, ascetic denial of the will. See the similarity in this
passage from The World as Will and Representation:
The true and
profound understanding of being […] does not […] serve as a quietus to the
will, nor does it redeem him from life forever, but only for a few moments; and
so it is not yet the way out of life for him, but merely a temporary
consolation within it (Schopenhauer, 1844a, p. 302, a.
trans.).
The
reason for the character’s profound boredom thus reflects the weariness of an
external world whose planned activities are diluted within an equally planned
division of time; the terms “time’s trolling” (Fortrollen der Zeit) or “the
wheel of time” (das Rad der Zeit) refer to the Romantics’ present
moment, which is becoming increasingly mechanized (Tieck & Wackenroder, 1799, p. 145, a. trans.). Faced with this present,
Tieck and Wackenroder (1799) revere
a past in which art and life were united, in which the artist’s self was not
yet split—an ideal which, as already mentioned, they found in Albrecht Dürer.
In this regard, it is important to emphasize the difference in meaning between
the Romantics’ term ‘wheel of time’ and its counterpart in Schopenhauer’s work.
Schopenhauer’s ‘wheel’ forms part of the cycle of the will and, as such, dates
back to something that has been taking place ever since, as suggested by the
following passage from The World as Will and Representation:
Whether we
hunt or flee, fear misfortune or strive for pleasure, it does not really make
any difference: the concern for the ever-demanding will, in whatever form,
constantly fills and moves the consciousness; however, without rest, no true
well-being is at all possible. Therefore, the subject of the will lies
permanently on the spinning wheel of Ixion, is forever draining the Danaids’
sieve, and is the eternally languishing Tantalus (Schopenhauer, 1844a,
p. 222, a. trans.).
This
Schopenhauerian structure of willing and striving can be interpreted as an
everlasting “constant wheel of wanting and suffering, obtaining, getting bored,
and then wanting and suffering all over again” (Ros Velasco, 2016, p. 117, a. trans.), whilst the “wheel of time” (Tieck &
Wackenroder, 1799, p. 136, a. trans.) criticized by
the Romantics constitutes a specific problem which they attribute to their mechanized
age. In this regard, as Hermann Wolf (1914)
emphasizes in his essay Schopenhauer’s Relationship with Romanticism and
Mysticism (Schopenhauers Verhältnis zur Romantik und Mystik), in
Schopenhauer’s philosophy, the unreality of the sensible world does not stem
from the same source as it does in the Romantic framework. Whilst for the
Romantic, reality causes pain due to their unfulfilled longing and nostalgia
for the Absolute, in Schopenhauer’s system the topos of the world as a
dream rests on a different foundation, namely “the metaphysical aspect and the
mystical aspect,” that is to say, the will, on the one hand, and the mystic’s “relative”
nothingness, on the other (Wolf, 1914, p. 278, a. trans.). Despite this
fundamental difference, Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art contains aesthetic
ideas that are significantly akin to those expressed by Wackenroder and Tieck
in their Phantasien, which the philosopher read in his younger years,
before his period of study in Göttingen (Pérez Cornejo, 2004). In this regard, the saint’s profound boredom—momentarily alleviated
by music—serves as an example that confirms the article’s hypothesis insofar
as, as has already been explained, both in the narratives of Tieck and
Wackenroder and in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, the aesthetic experience allows
one to forget, for a moment, the suffering of life.
However,
the article’s hypothesis does not fully hold true, as literary depictions of
boredom do not always foreshadow themes from Schopenhauer’s aesthetics. The
passage entitled “Das eigentümliche innere Wesen der Tonkunst,” for example,
does not address boredom at any point; yet it sets out ideas concerning art
that show a close affinity with the philosopher’s thinking: “It [the music]
boldly strikes the mysterious harp, sounding out certain dark, wondrous notes
in a specific sequence in the dark world—and the strings of our hearts
resonate, and we understand their sound” (Tieck & Wackenroder, 1799, p. 19, a. trans.). The metaphor of
acoustic resonance between the artist, the artwork and the audience conveys the
idea that art appeals solely to the emotions and not to the intellect, which
was also shared by Schopenhauer (Pérez Cornejo, 2004).
Furthermore, that reference in Phantasien to the universal understanding
of music—“we understand its sound,” states the narrator (Tieck &
Wackenroder, 1799, p. 194, a. trans.)— suggests an
affinity with the following idea contained in The World as Will and
Representation:
[Music] has
such a powerful effect on the very depths of the human soul, and is understood
there so completely and so profoundly as a universal language, the clarity of
which even surpasses that of the visible world itself: that we certainly have
more to seek in it than an exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se
numerare animi, as Leibniz described it (Schopenhauer, 1844a,
p. 290, a. trans.).
Tieck
and Wackenroder share the philosopher’s view of music as something beyond a
merely arithmetical and unconscious exercise, expressing in “Das eigentümliche
innere Wesen der Tonkunst” how, alongside that ‘system’ of technique
transformed into sounds, there is something more which defies all conceptualization:
they imagine it as a powerful “celestial spirit” (1799, p. 186, a. trans.). Naturally, it is
necessary once again to distinguish between the Romantic backdrop—always framed
by the constant search for the Absolute—and the immanence of Schopenhauer’s
philosophy; to the same extent, each will situate that ‘something more’ in
music in a different place. But what does seem similar is that, for both, the
art of sound expresses something that nothing else is capable of conveying,
that it does so in a distinct and fascinating way, and that it relates to the
mystery of the world and of the self. In The World as Will and
Representation, this seems to be expressed in the following statement: “we
[must] recognize a much more profound and deeper meaning in it, one that
relates to the innermost essence of the world and of our very selves”
(Schopenhauer, 1844a, p. 290, a. trans.); the
Phantasien will depict it as follows:
That
maddening arbitrariness with which, in the human soul, joy and sorrow, the
natural and the forced, innocence and ferocity, jest and dread become friends
and, often, suddenly join hands: what art portrays on its stage these mysteries
of the soul, with a meaning so obscure, mysterious and moving? (Tieck &
Wackenroder, 1799, p. 263, a. trans.).
In
short, not all passages in Phantasien contain depictions of boredom
bounded up with themes that later appear in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art;
often, the hypothesis of the article is not borne out. In some cases, such as
in the analyzed text “The Unique Inner Nature of Musical Art” (“Das
eigentümliche innere Wesen der Tonkunst”), aesthetic themes akin to
Schopenhauer’s appear on their own, without any reference or allusion to the
boredom of the narrator or any character.
Another
interesting case when analyzing Romantic depictions of boredom is that
portrayed in “A Letter from Joseph Berglinger” (“Ein Brief Joseph
Berglingers”), for in this letter written by a fictional character it seems
clear that he does not feel a profound weariness with the world around him, but
rather his account reveals a weariness with himself, with his inner
world: “I can never find a firm foothold within myself. My thoughts jostle
and intertwine ceaselessly, and I feel dizzy when I try to find a beginning, an
end and a sense of calm” (Tieck & Wackenroder, 1799, pp. 213–214, a. trans.). The composer not
only mentions feeling dizzy from searching for a beginning he cannot find, but
also describes lying “stretched out” and “rejected” (Tieck & Wackenroder, 1799, p. 207, a. trans). The boredom stemming from
a lack of certainties or principles to believe in was a real feature of Tieck’s
life (Köpke, 1855). Whilst Schlegel and some of his
contemporaries celebrated this as a hallmark of modernity and originality
characteristic of Romanticism, Tieck was aware of its negative side, which
consisted in losing “the yardstick […] for the world, for life and for the
human mind” (Tieck & Wackenroder, 1799, p. 206,
a. trans.). In his biography of Tieck, Köpke (1855)
recounts how, from a very young age, Tieck had been prone to frequent inner
crises and fluctuating moods, and how these, once reflected in his literary
work, became a “scathing critique to which he subjected himself and his younger
colleagues” (p. 206). His emotional ups and downs are linked to a lack of firm
convictions; in the following passage, Berglinger expresses the despair of the
artist cut off from active life:
My fantasies
tremble, shattered and in disarray, and all my feelings fade away into tears.
My lustful artistic pleasures are deeply poisoned from their very source; I
wander with a sick soul and, from time to time, the poison spills through my
veins. What am I? Why am I here, what am I doing in this world? What evil
spirit has distanced me so far from all mankind, to the point where I do not
know how to define myself? […] I do nothing but toss and turn in the sea of my
inner doubts (Tieck & Wackenroder, 1799, pp. 205–206,
a. trans.).
In a
similar vein, Wackenroder reflects on his emotional ups and downs in a letter
to Tieck, dated 27 November 1792. The young musician and poet begins the letter
by joyfully recalling an idyllic morning spent with his friend in Wörlitz, only
to suddenly lament the boredom caused by his law studies: “I have no zest for
life! Half my soul has been snatched away! And my time is all too often taken
up with unworthy pursuits and distractions. Alas, jurisprudence!” (1864, p. 226, a. trans.). In Wackenroder and
Tieck’s worldview, the artist is bored and suffers not only because of his
inner doubts, but also due to the mismatch between a monotonous world and his
far more ambitious desires and longings. One can see here an affinity with the
idea contained in The World as Will and Representation that “he [the
artist] himself bears the costs of representation […] and remains in constant
suffering” (Schopenhauer, 1844a, p. 302, a. trans.), for
Berglinger’s entire letter can be read as a testimony to the artist’s suffering
as he reflects on his own existence. Through the character of Berglinger, as
well as Wackenroder’s desperate letters, early Romanticism already reflects a
considerable degree of pessimism (Paulin, 1987).
The
literary portrayal of boredom in “Ein Brief Joseph Berglingers” is complex
because, whilst at first glance it appears to relate solely to the artist’s
inner world, it simultaneously refers to an external world that is alien to
that inner world; consequently, it remains unclear to what extent this is a
case of individual and chronic boredom or of chronified situation-dependent
boredom that has become profound. Given the ambivalence of Tieck’s texts and
the author’s penchant for a very subtle use of satire, it seems plausible that
the text allows for both interpretations. If one opts for chronified
situation-dependent, whose root lies in the external world alien to the
artist’s aspirations and ideals, then one can see in Berglinger a certain
affinity with the misunderstood genius in The World as Will and
Representation: “Genius, in its very actions and achievements, [is] usually
at odds with and in conflict with its own age” (Schopenhauer, 1844b, p. 391, a. trans.), which is reminiscent of
the sense of alienation Berglinger feels towards his fellow human beings.
3.3. Literary Representations
of Boredom and Ideas on Nature Linked with Them in “Der Runenberg.” Affinities
(and Differences) with Schopenhauer’s Thought
Around 1801, Tieck found
himself in the grip of a profound existential and poetic crisis, due in large
part to the serious losses he had suffered during that period. At that time,
the Norwegian philosopher and poet Henrik Steffens had become an important
friend to the Romantic: the two would engage in lengthy conversations on the
philosophy of nature, religion and poetry, as well as on Jakob Böhme, whose
works they both read avidly (Köpke, 1855). It was
also around this time that Jena was undergoing a period of change in terms of
philosophical influences: Fichte’s philosophy had given way to “a Romanticism
permeated by Naturphilosophie through the influence of Henrik Steffens,
linked above all—in a very Schellingian manner—to a fundamental, hidden and
threatening nature that cannot be tamed” (Carrasco Conde, 2015, p. 284, a. trans.). Absorbed by his readings
of Schelling and Böhme, as well as by his conversations with Steffens, Tieck
created “Der Runenberg” in a single night in 1802, a tale which depicts how the
inner vital forces repressed by the individual turn against him in the form of
a “vengeful spectre,” to the point of determining his fate (Rath, 1996, p. 271, a. trans.).
The “Kunstmärchen” tells the story of Christian, a young
man whose chronified situation-dependent boredom towards the “circles of
repetitive routine” [“Kreise der wiederkehrenden Gewöhnlichkeit”] (Tieck, 1892, p. 51, a. trans.) leads him to venture into the mysterious world of
the mountains, thereby abandoning his parents and acquaintances. He is
intensely drawn to all things rocky. As he ventures into the forest, far from
the bourgeois plain, an old man tells him of the wonders to be found on the
“rune mountain” [“Runenberg”] (Tieck, 1892, p. 56,
a. trans.)—a motif that some scholars have interpreted as an allegory of poetic
practice (Kremer, 1989). Christian feels so captivated by
the infinite promise of that inorganic natural world that he completely
overlooks the danger inherent in the steep ascent: “The abyss opening up
beneath his feet, threatening to swallow him whole, went completely unnoticed
by him, such was the drive fueled by his wild ideas and incomprehensible
desires” (Tieck, 1892, p. 57, a. trans.). Up there on the
top of the mountain, the sight of a woman of dazzling beauty and extraordinary
proportions immediately captivates him. When the Venus figure takes “a panel
that sparkled with numerous inlaid stones” (Tieck, 1892, p. 59,
a. trans.), Christian feels deeply moved:
an abyss of
forms and melodies, of longing and lust; a multitude of joyful, soaring
melodies swept through his soul, which was stirred to its very depths: he saw a
world of pain and hope welling up within him, mighty, miraculous pillars of
confidence and defiant optimism, great currents of water flowing, filled with
melancholy (Tieck, 1892, p. 59, a. trans.).
It is
noteworthy that negative and positive connotations coexist in relation to this idealized
female figure, who, on the one hand, instils “confidence and optimism” but, at
the same time, gives rise to “great currents of water […] filled with
melancholy” and a world described, paradoxically, as both “pain” and “hope”
(Tieck, 1892, p. 59, a. trans). Here and in
other passages, the story reflects its marked ambiguity: is the figure of that
woman with the fascinating board a sign of a revelation full of promise
following a long period of boredom, or is it, on the contrary, a danger lurking
for the protagonist?
The
scene is decisive because, as Rath (1996)
explains, the parallel with the motif of Mary and the book makes the handing
over of the panel to Christian a crucial moment, for it is precisely that
moment that opens up the possibility for him to choose between awakening and
self-denial:[1] “He did not recognise himself, and was
startled when the Beautiful One opened the window, handed him the magical stone
tablet and spoke these few words: ‘Take this in memory of me!’” (Tieck, 1892, p. 59, a. trans). The words spoken at the Last Supper reaffirm the
potentially revelatory nature of that experience for Christian (Rath, 1996). But instead of surrendering to his true inner strengths, he is
plunged into “a dark night veiled by clouds” and, where he had previously felt
“enthusiasm” and “love,” he now finds himself “exhausted, dizzy and
half-asleep” as he makes his way down the hill towards the plain (Tieck, 1892, p. 59, a. trans.). This repression of his true essence therefore has
drastic consequences: he continually hears the “terrifying subterranean groan”
(Tieck, 1892, p. 53, a. trans.) that the earth
utters every time, whilst working as a gardener, he pulls up a root (for nature
gives back to him what he himself has repressed) and, possessed by a violent,
instinctive passion, he sacrifices hours of sleep to devote himself to
boundless adoration of gold: “It calls to me when I sleep; I hear it when music
plays, when the wind blows […] So I have to go out at night, just to satisfy
its craving” (Tieck, 1892, p. 66, a. trans.). According to
Rath (1996), Christian’s true fault lies in
his indecision, in the fact that he never manages to make up his mind, despite
having had the opportunity to do so.[2]
Had he chosen to follow the path dictated by his own nature, he might have
attained pleasure, which, in Tieck’s work, leads to self-realization (Rath, 1996).
Thus,
Christian’s boredom sets in motion his initial estrangement from bourgeois
society: it prompts Christian to climb the mountain, bringing him closer to a
rediscovery of himself through pleasure. The story therefore revolves around
the human being’s capacity to discover or repress “the energy of the soul”
(Rath, 1996, p. 271, a. trans.), which is
developed through a struggle of forces with Schellingian echoes and a trial
akin to the ‘point’ that Böhme (1832) establishes as a choice of the
individual between “light” and “darkness” (p. 6, a. trans.). In this thematic
area, there does not seem to be any profound affinity with Schopenhauer,
primarily because, for Tieck, the revelatory path that leads to self-discovery
involves surrendering to pleasure (Rath, 1996). But
there is another reason: the influence that his readings of Schelling and Böhme
had on Tieck whilst writing “Der Runenberg.” On this point, the following
comment by Schopenhauer (1860) in his Parerga und Paralipomena
is illuminating, particularly with regard to Schelling, regarding the fact that
the pre-eminence of the will over the intellect in philosophies preceding his
own is merely an element which, whilst constituting “a foreshadowing” or “a
premonition” of his philosophy, does not attain its level of foundation:
of every
great thought, before it has been discovered, there is a foreshadowing, a
premonition, a vague image, as if in a mist, and a fruitless attempt to grasp
it. However, only he who has recognized a truth from its very foundations is
its author. Even if, at one time or another, it has been uttered
semi-consciously and almost as if spoken in a dream, this means little more
than if it were written in so many letters, even if it were written in so many
words—just as the finder of an object is solely that person who, recognizing
its value, picked it up and kept it, but not the one who accidentally picked it
up and let it fall again; or, in the same way, Columbus is the discoverer of
America, but not the first shipwrecked person whom the waves washed up there
(pp. 166–167, a. trans.).
The
concept of the will as defined by Schelling is therefore not of the same nature
as that established by Schopenhauer; consequently, the story, which was
influenced by the former, does not appear to be based on a framework truly akin
to that of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Nor is the reception of Böhme akin to it,
for, unlike Schopenhauer, Tieck—despite not being a devout believer—had seen in
Böhme a “prophet” capable of uniting faith and poetry in his own person (Mayer,
1999, p. 57). This interpretation of Jakob Böhme’s
writings by the Romantics was not shared by Schopenhauer, who enjoyed reading
the mystic from an immanent perspective.[3]
Through
boredom, “Der Runenberg” explores the crossroads faced by the Romantic artist,
who is torn between a bourgeois, Catholic life and a solitary existence of
poetic ecstasy (and madness). What is at stake in the “Kunstmärchen” therefore
concerns “God, the Absolute and the Spirit”—those pieces of the jigsaw which,
as Safranski (2025) asserts, are the “majestic,
meaning-bestowing figures” with which the Romantics answered the question “What
lies behind the phenomenal world?” (p. 280, a. trans.)—a question to which
Schopenhauer (1844a), as is well known, gave a
radically different answer through his famous “will” (p. 113, a. trans.).
4. Conclusions
The analysis of the
various representations of boredom in the corpus suggests aesthetic affinities
at a superficial level; however, underlying this, the Romantic and
Schopenhauerian worldviews could not be more different. Whilst in the Romantic
texts there are at times 1) certain ‘echoes’ of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of
art alongside the motif of boredom—such as the momentary solace provided by the
aesthetic experience (in “Ein wunderbares morgenländisches Märchen von einem
nackten Heiligen”) or the separation of the genius from the rest of mankind (in
“Ein Brief Joseph Berglingers”)—there are points at which either 2) boredom
does not appear, despite the existence of an aesthetic affinity (see what has
already been said regarding music in “Das eigentümliche Wesen der
Tonkunst”), or 3) despite the presence of the motif of boredom in the literary
text in question, it appears linked to existential and artistic dilemmas that
do not seem to bear any relation or affinity to Schopenhauer’s ideas (see “Der
Runenberg”). “Ein Brief Joseph Berglingers” constitutes a special case because,
on the one hand, Berglinger’s boredom can be interpreted as a weariness with
himself and his own inner world (which would place him in category 3), but, on
the other hand, the Romantic ambiguity leaves open a more veiled allusion to
the radical gulf between the external world and the artist’s “aspiration”
(Tieck & Wackenroder, 1799, p. 206,
a. trans.), which, once again, suggests affinities with Schopenhauer. Another
interesting point in common is the similar perception of music as an art form
very close to the mysterious essence of the world, a subject briefly touched
upon here—as it goes beyond the scope and objectives of this article—and which
can be examined in greater depth in existing research, such as Dahlhaus’s (1989) The Idea of Absolute Music or Fubini’s
(2005) Musical Thought of Romanticism (Il
pensiero musicale del Romanticismo). Ultimately, the initial hypothesis of
this article is not fully borne out, and this seems to stem, fundamentally,
from the radically different ways in which Schopenhauer and the Romantics
defined the ‘thing in itself.’
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[1] This self-denial
has to do with the artist’s repression of his own nature (Rath, 1996), not with the
Schopenhauerian denial of the will.
[2] Tieck himself (1937) experienced
something similar during his first year of university studies in 1792 when,
walking along “a beautiful path amongst willow trees” and climbing “a few
hills” on his way to the imposing Harz mountain range, suddenly, as the sun
rose, he was overcome by a sense of ecstasy that transformed him (p. 41, a.
trans.). Such is the content of his letter to Ida von Lüttichau, written in
1853. The unique nature of the moment becomes clear when reading the following
words by Tieck (1937): “Where can I find
the words to describe, even vaguely, the miracle, the vision that appeared
before me and transformed my soul, my inner being, all my strength, and swept
me away and led me towards the invisible, towards the divinely great and
ineffable?” (p. 41, a. trans.). However, shortly afterwards the young Tieck
descends the hill, returning to the ordinary world: “I made my way down the steep
mountain with difficulty and, about an hour’s walk away, in a village, I had my
first breakfast. Never again did I encounter that indescribable personal love,
so palpable and compelling” (1937, p. 41, a. trans.).