Arquivo para September 6th, 2018
The veil and the truth
06
Sep
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han pronounces the sentence: “to be beautiful is fundamentally 
veiled” (Han, 2016, 40) and then to lean on Walter Benjamin who also sees “the critique of art as a hermeneutic of cover-up … does not have to to lift up the veil, but rather, what has to do is rise the true intuition of the beautiful, but only thanks to a very exact knowledge of the beautiful as veil, must rise to an intuition that will never reveal itself to this we call empathy … pure from the naive to the intuition of the beautiful as a secret “(Idem, 40).
But Chul Han goes further: “Beauty communicates neither to immediate empathy nor to naive observation. Both procedures try to lift the veil or look through it … “(idem), that is why although in all times there was always the cover-up, only now with the” immediate empathy” would say precipitate since Benjamin claims it, is that the beautiful it becomes more obscure and with the truth the same happens.
Chul Han goes to the text, and using St. Augustine states that “God purposely obscured the Holy Scriptures with metaphors, as a ‘picture frame’, to make them the object of desire … maximizes pleasure through the text and makes reading a loving act “(p. 41).
The reading, the text and the truths in our time, the objectivity tries through the cognoscent subject, plural use because for the ontology the truth is more than subject is Being and therefore, can only be unveiled in the relation of beings, however the subject of idealism “transcends” to arrive at the knowledge of the object, of which only has “perceptions”.
It is a primary sensitivism, it seems truth and unveiling, but it is pure speech, there is in fact the knowledge of the object as a thing, Husserl had already claimed that it was necessary to return the “things themselves”, that is, not to reify them, but to reveal them.
The truth of immediate empathy is little elaborated, it does not expect reflection, contemplation, it lives on an almost unhealthy impulsivity, sometimes unhealthy even though it soon becomes frustrated by the facts, it even denies the facts and it frightens.
It is not collective blindness, but a lack of collective dialogue, a lack of deeper empathy, less formal and less superficial relationships and ties, lacking in truth and beauty.
Han, B.C. The salvation of the beautiful. Lisboa: Relógio d’Água, 2016.
