Arquivo para August, 2024
The heart and beliefs
02
Aug
The heart is a vital organ, it irrigates blood
throughout the organism reaching all the cells of the human body, when we talk about beliefs (they are also hidden in objects of human knowledge, we believe that something is a certain “way”) we do not we just talk about faith.
Byung-Chul Han, when carrying out his analysis based on the classic authors of Western philosophy, approaches a perspective of what he will call “affective tone”, focusing mainly on Heidegger.
His book, unlike others that are just essays, has “Heidegger’s heart: on the concept of affective tonality in Martin Heidegger” (Ed. Vozes, 2023), his first book in my opinion, with a new, human and spiritual analysis. even spiritual at the core of Western philosophy.
Part of a concept dear to Judeo-Christian civilization, which is that of circumcision, but circumcision of the heart and not of the failed organ (the skin attached to the beginning of the penis), it is necessary to remember that although it is a male organ, it is an emblem of power, of authority and desire, was culturally a warlike culture.
The part of his vision with his eastern vision and that has a spiritual sense for his entire philosophical question, Han will develop that it is the circumcision of the heart, that which modulates and governs affection, circumcision has a different meaning than what is commonly spoken, the controversy between Christians and Jews at the beginning of the Christian era, is the circumcision of the heart.
Circumcision is the act of removing the skin of the male sexual organ, but even in the biblical sense it was the skin of the heart, in Deuteronomy it reads: “Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and no longer stiffen your neck” (Dt 10,6), citing in the epigraph of the first chapter of the book: “Circumcision of the heart” (Han, 2023, p. 7).
Thus, “this circumcision frees the heart from subjective interiority” (Han, 2023, p. 11), and there is a surprising preliminary conclusion in Heidegger: “Heidegger’s heart, on the other hand [confronts with Derrida], listens to one voice , follows the tonality and gravity of the “one, the only one that unifies” (Han, 2023, p. 14-15), for him it is an “ear of his heart” and thus there is something strong spiritual in this.
It is there that the human being finds his essence: “he remains in tune with that from which his essence is determined. In the tuning determination, man is affected and called by a voice that sounds all the purer the more silently it resonates through the sonant” (Han, 2023, p. 15) literally quoting Heidegger.
He will not say that it is faith, and it reveals the Buddhist influence of his thought, the author’s only link, in my opinion, with idealism, because in Buddhism there is only a personal elevation, there is no Person on the other side, who resonates through the resounding, that voice of the Holy Spirit.
The author clarifies the disagreement between Derridá and |Heidegger: “The ‘polyphony’ that Derrida opposes to totality does not exclude tonality” (pg. 16) we would say if these authors: Han, Derrida and Heidegger were Christians, that Heidegger and Han would be monotheists and Derrida would be polytheist, but it is clear that this “resounding voice” is not that of God, but from within.
Han, B.C. (2023) Heidegger’s Heart: on the concept of affective tone in Martin Heidegger. Trans. Rafael Rodrigues Garcia, Milton Camargo Mota. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes.
Form and content
01
Aug
Modern philosophy has separated the form from
the content, just as a label is separated from an ingredient that exists in a bottle, but this comes from the reduced understanding of what matter is, the hylé of the Greeks, whose thought in Aristotelian terminology interconnects them in hylemorphism (ὕλη, hýle = “matter”; μορφή, morphé = “form”).
For this to have an anthropological scope, necessary for the discourse on cultural diversity, it is necessary to link act and power, as Thomas Aquinas did, where matter is not what we today designate (like substance, for example), but rather what is as a possibility or in potential, written like this by Thomas: “matter est id quod est in potentia” (matter is that which is in potential) (THOMAS, ST I q.3 a.2 c), in current terms, while It’s not an act, it’s just a given.
Thus the act is the existence of fact, or the action itself, that is, “forma est actus (form is act) (ST I q.50, a.2, obi.3), so we let ourselves be shaped by ideas, actions and thoughts that can be deeper or shallower, based on just a few words.
Thus the articulation of the binomials power x act and matter x form is in this way, “matter is nothing but power, form is that through which something is, as it is the act” (THOMAS, ScG II, c.43), these Categories give a distinction from fundamental metaphysics, and anthropologically mean that one thing is the possibility of existing or acting: power or matter, another thing is actually existing or acting: act or form.
Some modern theologies want to separate body and soul, this is without eschatological and biblical foundation, otherwise the human figure of Jesus would be divided into two: the divine and the human, which would be in opposition and would fight against each other, and this is why the Christian anthropology must be rigorously unitary, as it is in Thomas Aquinas.
M matter and form (seen in this new aspect linked to content and essence), without its actual existence (form) the body would not even exist, but only the possibility of existing (potentially) makes it exist in act, this unity is radical, since the necessary condition for its existence is the body, so spirituality is not just “body” there is an essence in it.
It is fundamental to understanding Christian anthropology, written clearly by Thomas: “The human being is not just a soul, but something composed of soul and body” (THOMAS, ST I q. 75 a 4c), if on the one hand not all materialism (which is not hylemorphism) denies the existence of the soul, much bad theology seeks to deny the existence of the body, it is the modern dualistic relationship, crystallized in objectivity and subjectivity, in which both are mutilated, so they were not “shaped” with a spirit new.
According to Thomas Aquinas, human living bodies and their actual existence (form, also called by him the intellective soul) is immortal, unlike other non-human living bodies, whose existence has a beginning and an end, not the eschatological end, but the finalist end of an interruption, as all humans die, and for him death is explained as a provisional disability through which we pass into an immortal existence and overcome the radical disability of the living body through death.
The metaphor of the potter that transcends the simplistic analysis of simple adherence (Jer 18, 3-4): “I went to the potter’s house, and behold, he was working at the wheel; When the vase he was molding with clay broke down in his hands, he was once again making another vase out of that material, as seemed best to his eyes.”
AQUINAS, T. (2001-2006) Suma Teológica. Brazil São Paulo: Loyolla, 8 v.
