Arquivo para August 19th, 2022
Dark times and virtues
19
Aug
Dark time of politics, threats of war and pandemic do not
completely hide the paths of the clearing, although its true meaning is debatable, neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment were in fact “clearings” and Sloterdijk has revised Heidegger’s clearing, it is possible in times of anger to see virtues that lead to the clearing.
Sloterdijk, in his book/essay “Time and Ira”, points out the exhaustion of traditional models of political processes, I argue from a historical review of the great global political impacts, inverting the biopolitics advocated by Foucault to a social psycho-politics.
He points to affections that he calls “thymotic”, especially anger, as well as its degenerate derivatives, resentment and the desire for revenge, for example (but there may be others such as incitement to hatred), become the fundamental driving force of history and politics, so it’s about mobilizing these forces, and the populists do it well, to mobilize the population.
Virtue, good proposals and the call for dialogue seem to lose strength, however, the author himself points out that psychic ecosystems (among them moral) can produce these “affections”.
Written in 2006, the author already showed that anger, whose capital is precisely the dispersed and globalized world anger, produces a cultural omnipresence that he calls the “metaphysics of revenge”, but does not develop that the types of moral “affections” can be an opposing force.
It was not without this force that the Greeks developed the concepts of the citizen of the polis, it was not without the encounter with the human (excessively anthropocentric, it is true) that the renaissance made a re-encounter with humanism, after its modern development, now check me out.
The virtues seem heroic, impossible and almost despicable, the theft of the public thing, dialogue and the de facto respect for democracy (polarization favors dictators), seem to have no other way out, but the virtues exist and they are subject to our humanity (Picture: Giotto: The Allegories of Virtues, 1303-5).
It is not just about the female figure, racial forces and the countless forgotten people in politics, the important thing is to highlight that a social turn must be composed of moral and social virtues.
The figure of the mother was even developed by the writer Máximo Gorki in his historic book “The mother”, which does not mean anything other than the generation of good virtues, also those that generate social justice and peace between men, the Greek Maieutics , Sloterdijk perhaps alludes to the “matrix in grêmio” (in the mother’s lap) in her spheres.
In biblical terms, the figure of Mary, forgotten by some and even despised by Christians, is nothing other than the memory that from her “birth” comes a redemption, a salvation and it is not by chance that she is seen as all virtuous.
The biblical passage in which Mary tells her cousin Elizabeth that she was pregnant with Jesus is clear in her cousin’s greeting (Mt 1:42-43): “With a loud cry, she exclaimed: “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit from your belly! How can I deserve to have the mother of my Lord come to visit me? , being human (and divine through participation in childbirth) is within our reach.
SLOTERDIJK, P. Time and Wrath (Tempo e Ira), Brazilian edition: Estação Liberdade, 2006.
SLOTERDIJK, P. Spheres I: bubles (Esferas I: bolhas). São Paulo, Brazil: Estação Liberdade, 2016
