Boredom as a Propositional Attitude: Reading Alberto Moravia with Hegel

Eliza Starbuck Little

1. Introduction

My goal in what follows is to pick out and begin to describe the set of relations in which

subjective perceivers, empirical objects, historical situations, and works of art stand to one

another. If this doesn’t already seem like a losing proposal for a short paper, my approach to the

topic will be somewhat eclectic: my primary interest is philosophical (in a broad sense), but one

of the central texts I consider is a novel by Alberto Moravia. I will suggest three things: (i) that

the way in which human beings perceive the reality of empirical objects is historically variable (ii)

that this variability is not merely arbitrary, but, rather, indexes the political, social and economic

conditions of the perceivers in question; and, finally, (iii) that works of art (in this case, Moravia’s

novel) can serve as the sites in which this indexing is made explicit. None of these are new

claims—for readers in some fields, particularly those inflected by Marxism and critical theory,

they will border on truisms. But, in the context of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy,

these points remain mostly overlooked and under-theorized. In light of this, my ultimate aim is

to offer some resources for “translating” work that has been done in these other theoretical

contexts into a philosophical register.

The two texts I will focus on will be Alberto Moravia’s 1960 novel, Boredom, and Hegel’s

Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit. I argue that Moravia’s novel presents a story about the way in

which our psychological orientation towards the reality of the empirical world reveals something

about the greater social, political and economic contexts we inhabit. Moravia’s protagonist, Dino,

finds himself in the situation of being unable to attain to conviction about the reality of his

world. He is afflicted by a condition that Italian theorists have dubbed “incommunicability.”1

1 See especially Franco Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2009).

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The term has existentialist connotations (the Italian ‘noia’ is cognate with the French ‘ennui’) but it

is intended, above all, as a description of an historically specific experience of the empirical

world’s opacity to cognition in the context of rapid industrialization and political malaise that

characterized Italy in the decades after World War II. Some scholars, working in a Marxist vein,

have linked this opacity up with the kind of alienation that characterizes the lived experience of

laboring under capitalist conditions. I offer a different gloss and take an alternate route through

Hegel. Dino’s boredom, I argue, is not (or at least not only) a problem of alienation

[Entäusserung]; it is also a problem of what Hegel describes in his Philosophy of Mind as

“recollection” [Erinnerung]. Understood in this way, boredom describes an inability on the part of

a thinking subject to match up what is made available in perception with an adequate mental

representation; in Hegel’s language, which I will unpack below, it is an inability to synthesize

sense perceptions and mental representations in the way that is necessary for successfully

cognizing the reality of the world.

From a more narrowly philosophical perspective, my aim is to say something about the

fate of empirical objects and the empirical judgments that we make about them in the context of

an idealist philosophical picture.2 In particular, I’m interested in examining the role that

psychological intentional stances play in the activity of theoretical judgment when we operate

under the assumption that mind and world share a logical form in common. By “psychological

intentional stances” I mean, paradigmatically, the kind of belief that is often described as

accompanying judgment about empirical states of affairs. But, as will become clear, I am also

interested in other sorts of mental states or activities that can be used to describe the points of

contact between the psychology of particular judgers and logical acts of judging.

I understand one of Hegel’s key insights to be the idea that certain kinds of error are

constitutive of, rather than incidental or contrary to, the activity of reasoning about the world.

2 I use ‘idealist’ in a narrow sense here to refer to Kantian and post-Kantian idealisms that view apperceptive unity

to be of central philosophical importance.

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This idea has gained some traction on the practical side of things.3 But it has seen less success on

the theoretical side, where most of us, regardless of the views we profess, remain attached to the

reality of our empirical perceptions. In what follows I aim to suggest something about why we

might want to question this attachment, and what it might look like to do so in a way that is

critical without being skeptical.

The essay proceeds in four sections. I begin in section one with a discussion of Moravian

boredom and the sort of philosophical problem it presents. In section two, I look more closely at

Boredom as a work of literature. In three, I turn to Moravia’s own theoretical work and context.

Finally, in four, I discuss how Hegel’s philosophical account of perception offers a helpful frame

for understanding the cognitive stakes Moravian boredom.

2. Boredom as a Philosophical Problem

Alberto Moravia’s Boredom begins with a small-scale crisis of representation. Dino, the

novel’s first-person narrator, announces in the opening line, “I recall perfectly well how I

stopped painting” (B 3).4 He goes on to recount violently slashing a piece he has been working

on for two months into ribbons using a paint scraper, in what he describes as a “furious and

fundamentally rational gesture of destruction” (B 3). This accomplished, he sets up a blank

canvas on his easel, which will recur, persistently empty, for the duration of the novel.

According to Dino, the cause lying behind his destruction of the canvas and the

subsequent cessation of his painting practice is his lifelong affliction with the book’s namesake

malady: boredom. Dino’s boredom is not, as we might assume from our standard colloquial use

of the word, a condition brought on by a lack of amusement or distraction. Rather, for Dino,

boredom refers to a very specific cognitive predicament. In his words:

3 Due in large part to thinkers like Stanley Cavell, Martha Nussbaum, and Bernard Williams in a more general
context, and thinkers like Axel Honneth and Robert Pippin in the more specifically Hegelian context.
4 Alberto Moravia, Boredom (New York: New York Review, 2005). Cited henceforth as [B].

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 Boredom to me consists in a kind of insufficiency, or inadequacy, or lack of reality…

The feeling of boredom originates for me in a sense of the absurdity of a reality which is

insufficient, or anyhow unable, to convince me of its own effective existence. (B 5)

As it is described here, the special sort of boredom in question presents as a kind of failure of

contact between Dino’s inner life, his subjectivity or his thinking, and the object world that we

would typically describe as being “outside” or “around” him. This is both an epistemic and an

ontological problem. As a knower, Dino is unable to attain to a conviction about the existence of

reality and he struggles with a sense of its absurdity. At the same time, the being of the world

itself comes up short insofar as it is unable to successfully disclose itself to Dino.

Dino offers a series of three metaphors aimed at conveying the experiential aspect of his

boredom:

Reality, when I am bored, has always the same disconcerting effect upon me as (to use a

metaphor) a too-short blanket has upon a sleeping man on a winter night: he pulls it

down over his feet and his chest gets cold, then he pulls it up on to his chest and his feet

get cold and so he never succeeds in falling properly asleep. Or again (to make use of a

different comparison) my boredom resembles a repeated and mysterious interruption of

the electrical current inside a house: at one moment everything is clear and obvious—

here are armchairs, over there are sofas, beyond are cupboards, side tables, pictures,

curtains, carpets, windows doors; a moment later is nothing but darkness and an empty

void. Yet again (a third comparison) my boredom might be described as a malady

affecting external objects and consisting of a withering process; an almost instantaneous

loss of vitality—just as though one saw a flower change in a few seconds from a bud to

decay and dust. (B 5)

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These comparisons all foreground the affective dimension of boredom, and they do so in a

progression of escalating negativity. The banal frustration of being unable to get comfortable in

one’s bedclothes leads into the more sinister unease caused by flickering lights in a dark house.

The final image is of a profoundly unnatural phenomenon, the rapid withering of something

living, which hints at a disruption of the normal order of things by an enervating external force.

This evokes a more global uncanniness, an atmosphere of sickness or perhaps even dark magic.

In all three metaphors the perception of quotidian empirical objects serves as the locus

of manifestation for an underlying problem. Each case is slightly different: the too-short blanket

is situationally unsuitable, the furnishings of the dark house are inconstantly visible, and the

withering flower indicates a failure of the teleological process of organic life. Across all these

cases, the objects themselves are not “responsible” for their various insufficiencies—they are not

apparently broken or, in the case of the flower, diseased. Rather, they point beyond themselves,

prompting questions about the ultimate source of dysfunction.

This source seems to be the relation in which these objects stand to subjective perceivers.

Dino describes the contrast between the good and bad cases of object perception as follows:

I may be looking with some degree of attentiveness at a tumbler. As long as I say to

myself that this tumbler is a glass or metal vessel made for the purpose of putting liquid

into it and carrying it to one’s lips without upsetting it—as long as I am able to represent

the tumbler to myself in a convincing manner—so long shall I feel that I have some sort

of relationship with it, a relationship close enough to make me believe in its existence.

But once the tumbler withers away and loses its vitality in the manner I have

described…then from that very absurdity springs boredom. (B 5-6)

Crucially, the difficulty in question does not have precisely to do with what we might describe as

the “legibility” of the world. As Moravia’s novel begins, Dino is able to pick out objects, to name

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them, to use them, and, to some extent, to evaluate them. From an external point of view, he

appears for all intents and purposes to be successfully judging the world. He is not, then,

suffering from a straightforward failure of reason. As we saw in a previously quoted passage,

Moravia foregrounds the thought that Dino’s destruction of the painting he is working on is “a

fundamentally rational gesture.” This signals that the act issues from something other than a fit

of rage or insanity; Dino remains in possession of his faculties as he defaces the canvas.

Nor can Dino’s situation be described as a variety of external world skepticism.

Skepticism is a reflective pose, a stance taken up by thinkers interested in considering whether or

not it is possible to give an account of the reality of the world. In order to adopt this pose an act

of abstraction is required, precisely because of the formidable power of persuasion that

perceptual experience tends to exercise on us. Descartes, for example, has to clear his calendar,

shut himself up in his study and “shut [his] eyes, stop up [his] ears…and blot out from [his]

thoughts all images of corporeal things” in order to even entertain the skeptical question.5 To

take another example, Pyhrronian skeptic Sextus Empiricus employs the term “epoché,” defined

as a suspension of the intellect “on account of which we neither deny nor affirm anything," to

describe the skeptical stance.6 This can be construed as the exact inverse of Dino’s position:

whereas the skeptic believes without judging, Dino judges without believing.7

Understood in this way, Dino’s boredom is formally akin to a problem described by G.E.

Moore and made famous by Wittgenstein as “Moore's Paradox”: it consists in a contradiction

between Dino’s knowledge of what is the case and his corresponding belief about what is the

case. The classic examples that recur in the 20th century analytic literature on the topic are the

5 René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald Cress, (Indiannapolis: Hackett

Publishing Co., 1998), p. 69.

6 Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans. Benson Mates, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), I.4.
7 It is a point of contention in the literature whether or not someone in this condition ought properly to be

described as holding a belief. Burnyeat (1980) and Barnes (1982) argue against, Fine (2000) argues in favor. For my
purposes, I follow Fine. See Jonathan Barnes, “The Beliefs of a Pyrrhonist”, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological
Society, N.S. 28: 1–29 (1982); Myles Burnyeat, “Can the Sceptic Live His Scepticism?”, in M. Schofield, M. F.
Burnyeat, and J. Barnes (eds.), Doubt and Dogmatism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 20–53; and Gail Fine,
“Sceptical Dogmata: Outlines of Pyrrhonism I 13”, Methexis 12: 81–105 (2000).

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formulae, “It’s raining, but I don’t believe that it’s raining” (‘p’ and ‘I don’t believe that p’) or

“It’s raining and I believe that it’s not raining” (‘p’ and ‘I believe that not-p’).8 For my purposes

here, the paradox’s main feature of interest is the formal description of a disjunction between a

propositional claim about what is the case and the attendant belief that results in a contradiction.

In his Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Wittgenstein describes Moore’s paradox as

picking out something about the relationship between the internal and external worlds of the

asserter. He writes:

The paradox is this: the supposition may be expressed as follows: ‘Suppose this went on

inside me and that outside’ — but the assertion that this is going on inside me asserts this is going

on outside me. As suppositions the two propositions about the inside and the outside are

quite independent, but not as assertions.9

Here, as the italicized portion of text indicates, Wittgenstein’s claim is that there seems to be a

necessary relation of fit between an asserter’s beliefs about what is the case and what she in fact

takes to be the case. Summarizing the paradox, Wittgenstein states outright: "I believe p" says

roughly the same as "⊢p."10 The assertion and the belief come on the scene together, and this

togetherness seems to be in some way indicative of the way in which the very structure of a

propositional claim is premised on the mutual permeability of our inside and outside worlds, of

subjectivity and objectivity, of the psychological expression of belief and the logical act of

assertion.

But, for Moravia’s Dino, this does not hold. Dino is bored. This means his beliefs have

8 These two sentences respectively exemplify two versions of the paradox, the omissive and the commissive. The

distinction is worth noting but will not concern us here.

9 Quoted in Mitchell Green and John Williams, Moore’s Paradox : New Essays on Belief, Rationality, and the First Person.

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), p. 3. My emphases.

10 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Pyschology: Volume I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980),

p. 92, §478.

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somehow come apart from his assertions and, consequently, he finds himself living in a state of

contradiction. Recall the passage quoted earlier claiming that the “withering” of a worldly thing

consists in its appearance as “an absurd object.” Dino expands on this: “from that very absurdity

springs boredom, which when all is said and done is simply a kind of incommunicability and the

incapacity to disengage from it” (B 6). This absurdity can be construed as Dino’s experience of a

lack of compatibility between his acts of thinking and the objects he is trying to think about; or,

put otherwise, as a disconnect between the rationality of his mind and the worldly objects that

should be transparent to his reason but which, in this case, are not. We can thus view Dino’s

boredom as a word describing the lived experience of the situation of contradiction brought

about by a global failure of his ability to take on the psychological attitude of belief that is

appropriate to his understanding of what is true about the world. The problem manifests

precisely in his recurrent assertion of “p” and “not I believe that p.” In this way, Moravia’s

boredom describes a psychological intentional stance or a propositional attitude; it refers to the

negative attitude of ‘not-believing’ a propositional claim that one is trying to assert.

3. Boredom, the Novel

In spite of the description I’ve just offered, Boredom is not straightforwardly a novel about

propositional knowledge. If I were trying to sell you on actually reading the book, I would tell

you that it is mostly about sex, jealousy, and bourgeois discontent. After his bombastic

renunciation of painting in the novel’s opening scene, Dino becomes embroiled in what presents

as a dime store knock-off of Swann’s Way. He begins an ill-fated love affair with a seventeen-year-

old artist’s model, Cecilia, who is the former muse of his recently deceased neighbor, Balestrieri

(also a painter). Balistrieri is rumored to have died from the intensity of his obsession with

Cecilia, and Dino’s interest in the affair stems at first from his fascination with Balistrieri’s

obsession. He contrives to take Balistrieri’s place in order to discover how his neighbor had

“managed to fall so desperately in love with her” (B 105). In this way, the love affair is a sort of

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emotional plagiarism, demonstrative of the fact that Dino’s creative crisis extends beyond his

empty canvas.

The dispassionate, almost clinical, way in which Dino sets about becoming obsessed

with Cecilia underscores the dysfunction of belief that stands at the heart of the novel. There is

not much in the text to persuade the reader that Dino loves, or even particularly likes, Cecilia,

whom he describes as being characterized by “great simplicity”:

Not, however, the simplicity of common sense, which has always something open-

hearted about it, but rather the troubled, enigmatic, incompetent simplicity of that kind

of psychological amputation of which reticence, even if unconscious and involuntary, is

the result. (B 105)

Apart from Balistrieri’s passion, it is precisely the insufficiency of Cecilia’s character that draws

Dino to her. She serves as a living analogue of Dino’s object world, an animate object which he

can (and does) try to interrogate in order to bring about her intelligibility. This to little avail, since

the flatness of Cecilia’s experience as she recounts it fails to offer the kind of insight Dino

imagines his constant questioning might yield.

In addition to lacking self-awareness, Cecilia seems to suffer from a condition of

disconnection from the world that is similar to Dino’s own. When Dino asks her about her life,

she “[gives] the impression not so much of lying as of being incapable of telling the truth; and

this not because she was untruthful but because telling the truth would have implied having a

relation with something, and she did not appear to have a relation to anything” (B 105). Thus, we

are led to suspect that Cecilia, too, is bored, though she does not have the same reflexive grasp

of her condition that Dino apparently has.

Moravia’s writing is typically psychosexual in character. His novels and stories feature a

variety of less than savory erotic situations, ranging from the desultory to the horrific. Boredom is

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no exception. The majority of the book, however, consists in Dino’s interrogations of Cecilia, his

attempts to cultivate a habit of venality in Cecilia so that he can recuse her, and, finally, in

descriptions of the elaborate measures of surveillance that Dino undertakes after he (inevitably)

discovers that Cecilia is being unfaithful to him. Although these episodes all nominally arise out

of Dino’s erotic fixation, they are motivated, above all, by a desire for understanding. And

somewhere behind this desire and his inability to satisfy it lurks Dino’s entrenchment in the

cognitive predicament of boredom described in the previous section: that is, Dino’s inability to

believe in the reality of his world.

4. Moravia’s Theoretical Frame

In a compilation of critical essays entitled Man as End (published in 1963, but written

across two decades prior), Moravia himself describes his fiction as being aimed at intervening in

“a crisis in the relationship between the author and reality.”11 The apparent modernism of this

idea stands in some tension with the distinctly old-guard flavor of Moravia’s intellectual self-

conception as it is displayed in these essays. He has a strong awareness of his position within an

Italian literary tradition stretching back through Boccaccio and Ariosto to Ovid and Apuleius.

His critical aim, moreover, is self-consciously out of step with his contemporaries—he refers to

his stance as “a defense of humanism at a time when anti-humanism is the fashion.”12

But Moravia is not naïve. He warns his readers in his Preface:

…we must have no illusions. We shall have an ever-larger number of cheap, well-made

consumer goods; our life will become more and more comfortable; and our arts, even the

most demanding and difficult ones, indeed those especially, will become more and more

accessible to the masses; at the same time we shall feel more and more despair.13

11 Alberto Moravia, Man as an End (London: Secker & Warburg, 1965), p. 167.
12 Moravia, Man as End, p. 9.
13 Moravia, Man as End, p. 12.

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Here and generally, Moravia’s writing is very much the product of its historical moment. Moravia

lived from 1909 to 1990. He published his first novel, The Time of Indifference, in 1929 when the

Fascist period was well underway in Italy. His relation to the Fascist state was complex. He had

relatives who were high-ranking officials in the regime, and he achieved literary success during a

time when censorship prevented many writers from gaining a public audience.14 At the same

time, Moravia’s fiction is politically critical, though typically obliquely so. As indicated above,

Moravia’s novels tend to emphasize the psychological experience of specific individuals in

specific situations, particularly in domestic and erotic contexts. The political element in novels

like Boredom is conveyed indirectly by the glaring lack of meaningful social structures in the lives

of the main characters.

Boredom was published in 1960, towards the end of the long decade of economic growth,

the “economic miracle,” that Italy enjoyed in the post-War era.15 In spite of the rapid increase in

material prosperity, the cultural climate was one of profound unrest. There was particular

confusion about Italian national identity in the wake of Fascism; this confusion was

compounded by the rapid change of class structures brought about by industrialization and the

attendant phenomenon of urbanization. In the words of Franco Berardi:

the words “alienation” and “incommunicability” were so often quoted by the European
discourse of the 1960s, that they became almost an epitome of that epoch, as much as
the words “globalization” and “virtuality” can be considered the epitome of present
times.16

Moravia, in Boredom, is sometimes credited with having coined one of these terms of art that

came to encapsulate the mood of the era: incommunicability. We have already encountered his

usage in Dino’s description of his boredom as “simply a kind of incommunicability and the

incapacity to disengage from it” (B 6). The most exemplary works from this era, however, are

cinematic: specifically, the trio of films (L’Avventura, L’Eclisse, and La Notte) directed by

14 George Talbot, “Alberto Moravia and Italian Fascism: Censorship, Racism and Le ambizioni sbagliate” in Modern
Italy, 11:2, 127-145, 2006.
15 See David Gutherz, Dissertation Draft, (University of Chicago, 2019).
16 Berardi, The Soul at Work, pp. 109-10.

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Michaelangelo Antonioni that were released from 1960-3.17

Berardi emphasizes the suitability of the Marxian model of alienation to analyzing the

phenomena displayed in these artworks. Famously, Marx’s notion of alienation emphasizes the

relationship between individual subjects as laborers and the objects produced by their labor—

and, most crucially, the inability of subjects to recognize themselves in their labor products under

the conditions of capitalism. The philosopher and critical theorist Axel Honneth differentiates

between an early “anthropologically-oriented” version of the theory of alienation in Marx’s early

work and a later more stringently economic version.18 The former is more apt to Moravia’s work

insofar as it retains an emphasis on the psychological situation of individuals, as Moravia does in

his novels.

As Honneth also notes, before alienation was a Marxian term of art, it was a Hegelian

term of art, and the anthropological variety of alienation described in Marx’s early work is

particularly indebted to Hegel’s Dialectic of Lord and Bondsman (colloquially known as the

master/slave dialectic) from the Phenomenology of Spirit.19 The German term that alienation

translates, Entäußerung, contains the root word meaning ‘outer’ and can also be translated as

‘externalization’. Thus, the term describes the process that takes place as the subject’s activity of

production turns into a produced object.

In the Hegelian context, alienation is only the first part of a two-part story: for Hegel, the

externalized object must once again be made internal. This latter process does not occur

physically, but, rather, mentally. On Hegel’s view, the reclamation of the alienated object occurs

in perception. He signals this by using the German ‘Erinnerung’ to describe a crucial aspect of the

perceptual process. This term is typically translated into English as ‘memory’, but, as we saw

17 More than twenty of Moravia’s novels were adapted as feature-length films. Most famous among these
adaptations are Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970, based on Moravia’s 1951 Il conformista) and Jean-Luc
Godard’s Contempt (1963, based on Moravia’s 1954 Il desprezza).
18 Axel Honneth, “Work and Instrumental Action” in The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political

Philosophy (New York: SUNY Press, 1995), p. 19.

19 Honneth, “Work and Instrumental Action”, p. 20.

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Marx do with ‘Entäußerung’ , Hegel is trading here on the term’s further etymological connotation

of ‘making inward’. My suggestion in the remainder of the paper will be that Hegel’s account of

Erinnerung—the process in which a perception is synthesized with a mental representation in

cognition—goes over and above Marx’s account of alienation in order to provide the theoretical

resources necessary for describing a fully worked out account of Moravian boredom.

5. Hegel’s Theory of Perception

My goal in this last section is to offer a sketch for a reading of Hegel’s account of

empirical cognition that contains resources for making sense of two aspects of what it is to be

bored in the Moravian sense we have been discussing. I draw on Hegel in order to describe (i)

the specific kind of cognitive failure that is taking place when a judger’s assertion of what is the

case comes apart from her belief about what is the case, and (ii) how this situation of failure links

up with the historical, social and economic circumstances in which the judger in question is

embedded. Hegel’s thought is uniquely suited to provide answers to these questions because of

his joint commitments to both the idea that all human cognitive activities are through and

through rational, and the idea that rationality itself is historical. In what follows, I motivate the

relevance of Hegel’s model of cognition for Moravia’s novel.

Hegel gives his most important account of empirical cognition—i.e, the kind of

perceiving and judging that we engage in as a daily matter of course and the kind of cognition

that Dino is struggling with in Boredom—in the Philosophy of Spirit.20 Our particular topic, the

perception of empirical objects, falls under Hegel’s category of theoretical cognition. Hegelian

theoretical cognition has three primary elements (in Hegel’s vocabulary, “logical moments”):

20 All citations from G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind: Being Part Three of the “Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences”

(1830), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). Henceforth cited as [PhilS]. German versions from
http://www.zeno.org/Philosophie/M/Hegel,+Georg+Wilhelm+Friedrich/Enzyklop%C3%A4die+der+philosophi
schen+Wissenschaften+im+Grundrisse/Dritter+Teil%3A+Die+Philosophie+des+Geistes [Accessed March,
2023].

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intuition [Anschauung], representation [Vorstellung] and thought [Denken]. Within these three

moments of finite cognition, there are a variety of sub-phases—such as memory [Erinnerung],

already mentioned in the previous section, which falls under representation—that complicate the

picture. To start, however, I will focus on showing how Hegel’s initial tripartite division of

cognition into intuition, representation, and thought works and why it is relevant to Moravia.

There is an ongoing debate in the secondary literature over precisely how the three

moments of Hegelian cognition relate to one another. Specifically, scholars disagree about

whether these moments are fully separable from one another. ‘Seperability’ in this context refers

to whether or not it is cognitively possible for a subject to engage in one of these activities

without engaging in the other two as well. All parties to the debate agree that the moments of

cognition are logically separable: everyone accepts that we can, upon reflection, distinguish mental

acts of intuition, representation, and thought that are meaningfully distinct from a philosophical

point of view. But not everyone agrees that these moments are distinct cognitive activities such

that we can, in fact, intuit without representing, represent without intuiting, and so forth.21

My primary aim here is not to try and adjudicate this complex issue. However, in order to

arrive at Hegel’s relevance for Moravia, it will be necessary to say something about why I think

that, at least in the Hegelian picture, the question about separability is not a simple either/or

question. Looking at the text, it seems clear that Hegel’s paradigm case of cognition is of a single

unified act of thinking that involves all three logical moments. Hegel writes, for example,

“intuition, representation, etc., are not isolated, and exist only as ‘moments’ in the totality of

cognition itself” (PhilS §445, p. 190). This passage seems to indicate strongly against seperability.

At the same time, however, Hegel also explicitly mentions that there is a way of

separating out the moments of cognition. Up the page from the passage just cited, Hegel admits:

“It is true that even as isolated [moment such as] intuition, imagination, etc. can afford a certain

21For an overview of the positions involved, see Luca Corti, “Hegel’s Later Theory of Cognition: An Additive or
Transformative Model?”, Hegel Bulletin, 43/2, 167–193 (2021).

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satisfaction [Befriedigung]: what physical nature succeeds in doing because of its inherent character

of self-externality…intellect can do either by means of a voluntary act or because it is itself

natural and unacculturated”(PhilS §445, p. 190).22 Thus, although the individual phases of

cognition are properly meant to come together in a single act, we can, purposefully or

accidentally, linger over some specific logical moment. We may do this because these moments

are in some way “satisfying” to us: we simply enjoy giving ourselves over to moments like mere

feeling (sitting in the sun on the first warm day in spring) or mere imagining (staring out the

window and fantasizing about better weather).

This possibility of stopping short of the ultimate goal of cognition in order to dwell in

one or another of its logical moments demonstrates that it is possible to talk sensibly about the

moments of cognition in isolation from one another. That is, on Hegel’s view as I’ve laid it out

here, it is not the case that we either succeed in thinking about the world or else do not. Rather,

there are a host of acts, of cognitive stopping points, that fall short of full-on rational cognition,

yet which are still in some way transparent to reason.

Properly filled out, I take this to go some way toward making sense of Dino’s lived

experience of boredom, a state of absurdity in which he seems to both know and not know

things about his world. We can conjecture that the state of boredom is also a kind of cognitive

stopping points. Unlike mere feeling or mere imagining, however, boredom is profoundly

dissatisfying and not a state that Dino has chosen to linger over by choice. Rather, boredom is a

cognitive failure that Dino has not opted into.

Hegel’s account offers further resources for specifying the peculiar disjunction between

perceiving and believing that characterizes boredom. In section 2, I described boredom in terms

of Moore’s paradox, arguing that Dino finds himself in a situation where his beliefs about what is

the case have somehow come apart from his assertions about what is the case. As we saw,

22 My translation.

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Moore and Wittgenstein claim that this should not be cognitively possible. Yet, it is Dino’s

situation. When we understand cognition as Hegel does, in terms of a set of logical acts that can

be separated even though they are not meant to be, we can, pace Moore and Wittgenstein, make

sense of how this might be possible.

As noted above, Hegel takes empirical cognition to consist in three elements: intuition,

representation, and thought. Dino is able to intuit (i.e., perceive) the empirical objects world. In

Hegelian terms, this means that things are going right for him with intuition. As noted, however,

Dino is unable to represent the reality of these objects to himself and, thus, the world he judges

accurately about does not ‘seem real’ to him. Once again in Hegelian terms, things are going

wrong with the second element of Dino’s acts of cognition: he is unable to properly represent

the world that perceives. This tallies with Moravia’s narrative which, as noted above, begins by

dramatizing Dino’s inability to engage in the representational activity par excellence: painting.

It will be helpful here to get a better grasp of what the unified activity of theoretical

cognition and the individual moments that comprise it consist in for Hegel. One way of

describing what finite thinking is in the Hegelian picture is to say that this sort of thinking

consists in the navigation of the relationship between mind and world. In the context of finite

cognition as it is described in the Philosophy of Spirit, “relationship” should be heard less in an

abstract theoretical register and more in the everyday sense in which we might use it to describe

relationships between human beings. On Hegel’s view, rational thought consists in part in a

process of negotiating boundaries between mind and world; as such, like any relationship, it

involves moments of closeness and moments of estrangement, conflicts and rapprochements.

There are moments in this dialectic when mind and world are so close together that they are

indistinguishable: describing Feeling [Gefühl], for example, Hegel writes, “feeling is…the closest,

contact in which the thinking subject can stand to a given content” (PhilS §447, p. 194). At other

points in the dialectic, the distance between mind and world seems insuperable. This emerges in

moments such as “Creative Imagination” [Phantasie], which, as the German name implies,

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involves mental representations that come apart almost completely from the objective traits of a

worldly thing disclosed in intuition. It is in Creative Imagination that mind “freely links and

subsumes its store [of images] in accordance with its own unique content” (PhilS §456).23 Here,

Hegel acknowledges the effect that subjective traits such as character, mood, and sense of humor

can have on our empirical cognition of the world.

These moments of closeness and distance between mind and world are rigorously

structured in a way that is both progressive and end-directed. In short, they are what Hegel calls

“dialectical.” The dialectical progression of the phases describes a movement that begins with

“Feeling” and ends up at “Formal Reasoning”. The central aims of the section are to describe

how movement between these two moments can take place and, in so doing, to explain how

theoretical cognition is possible. The section centers on a single problem: specifically, how can

the concrete, material sense-impressions disclosed in intuition [Anschauungen] be reconciled with

the abstract mental images [Bilder] that we make out of them? Put slightly otherwise, the problem

is that of how what we see when we look at something can be understood as congruent with the

mental image we form of the thing that allows us to look away but “keep seeing” the object in

question. It is only by effecting this reconciliation that we can succeed in thinking about the

world.

Hegel argues that the majority of the work needed to reconcile intuitions and images

takes place in the middle moment of this dialectic, in the moment of Representation [Vorstellung].

Hegel defines Representation as “recollected [erinnerte] intuition” (PhilS §451, p. 201). As

adumbrated above, the idea that the recollection accomplished in representing something is, as

the German implies, a kind of “making inner” of what begins as something outer is of central

importance here.

Returning to Moravia’s Dino, my proposal is that Hegel’s idea of recollection allows us

23 My translation („freies Verknüpfen und Subsumieren dieses Vorrats unter den ihr eigentümlichen Inhalt“).

ESLittle “Hegel & Moravia” 17

to better understand the cognitive difficulty that is occurring in Dino’s case. Dino is capable of

intuition; that is, he is able to perceive the world and, in so doing, to see what is the case. What

he cannot do is represent the situation to himself in a way that brings about his conviction in the

existence of the objects that he perceives. In Hegel’s terms, Dino is suffering from an inability to

recollect or ‘inwardize’ his intuitions. Instead, his physical vision and his mental vision remain

fundamentally different in kind and, so, incommensurate.

In the Hegelian context, there are additional resources for describing what it means when

an otherwise sound rational cognizer is unable to properly cognize the world. For Hegel, the

world is something that mind [Geist] gives itself. In the Phenomenology he writes, “Reason is Spirit

when its certainty of being all reality has been raised to truth, and it is conscious of itself as its

own world, and of the world as itself” (PhS §438, p. 263).24 This is not intended to indicate that

mind invents its objects (although in the case of artifacts, it certainly does), but, rather, to

describe the way human beings are able to recognize their own thought in their perceptions of

the world and, in so doing, to feel “at home” in the world. In the Encyclopedia, Hegel writes, “the

determinacies of feeling, of intuition, of desire, of willing, etc. are generally called representations,

inasmuch as we have knowledge of them, it can be said in general that philosophy puts thoughts

and categories, but more precisely concepts, in the place of representations. Representations in

general can be regarded as metaphors of thoughts and concepts” (EL §3, 26-7. Hegel’s

italics, my emphasis.).25 In this vein, a failure of empirical judgment can be a failure of thought’s

ability to recognize its own rational form in the symbolic form of empirical representations; this

is a joint failure of rational self-knowledge and of rational self-expression.

Another way of putting this is to say that the cognitive failure in question is not

necessarily a failure of Dino’s reasoning. Rather, it might also be a failure on the side of the

24G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Cited as [PhS].
25Hegel, G. W. F.. The Encyclopaedia Logic, with the Zusätze: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the
Zusätze. Ed. Théodore F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1991).
Cited as [EL].

ESLittle “Hegel & Moravia” 18

 object world, which is in some way not fully available to be reasoned about.

Recall, finally, that for Hegel, rational self-knowledge is historically bound. Certain kinds

of political and social structures are required in order for rational knowers to become fully legible

to themselves. This, I believe, would be the direction to look toward in order to address the

question I raised at the outset of this section about why Dino’s failure of judgment indexes his

historical situation.

6. Conclusion

My aim in this chapter has been to show that Hegel’s theory of empirical object

cognition is helpful for explaining the cognitive predicament described by Moravia and other

post-war existentialist authors. Specifically, I have argued that the apparently contradictory states

of knowing that empirical objects exist without believing in their reality is not a cognitive

impossibility, but, rather, a situation that can arise in historical situations in which the shared

social world becomes illegible to the judging subjects who live in it. In the case of Moravia’s

Dino, this has specifically to do with the breakdown of institutions in post-Fascist Italy. In this

way, the philosophy of mind can be understood as offering surprising insight into the historical

and sociopolitical circumstances of minded subjects.

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