Arquivo para January 23rd, 2025
For a true asceticism
23
Jan
Peter Sloterdijk, despite being an agnostic,
points out a “spiritual” defect in today’s society: it is a “society of exercises” that do not lead to a true inner “ascent”; it is a society of agitation, looking for “efficiency”, the “society of tiredness”.
The lack of time for meditation, for exercising the mind and soul, is leading to “brainrot”, the word of the moment according to Oxford University, which has included it in the dictionary, meaning rotten brain. It’s not just a question of consuming bad information, ignorance and the lack of exercise in a “contemplative life” as Byung Chul Han calls for creates a space in the mind for this type of thinking to grow.
We create a culture that isn’t even counter-culture in the sense of civilizational evolution, it’s just something rotten, we bombard our brains with fragments of thoughts, spiritual fragments without them completing each other and forming within us a true spiritual asceticism.
It’s empty activism, and to fill it we need more narcotics and food to fill the body’s emptiness while the mind remains empty, this same emptiness that could serve to create a “contemplative life” that would support asceticism and a balance in the virtuous circle.
Chul Han also recalls painting, quoting the work of the Frenchman Paul Cézanne: “Painting means nothing more than ‘letting go of the friendship of all these things in the open air’” (Han, 2023, p. 49).
It’s not just media culture that does this, it’s the absence of structural values of virtue and morality.
The loss of culture (or what remains of it according to Antoine Daniels) is this inability to see beauty and truth.
Of course, true asceticism, in the spiritual sense, cannot fail to encounter the divine, and as for useless “exercises” to take a “bath in spirituality” only to come out empty and without encountering being, says Han: “in the deep layers of being, they are suspended” (Han, 2023, p. 49).
It’s not just media culture that does this, it’s the absence of structural values of virtue and morality.
“The landscape of inactivity,” writes Byung Chul-Han about Cézanne, ‘breaks with nature made human and restores a non-humanized order of things in which they can meet’ (Han, p. 50).
Still quoting Cézanne: “Ah! Landscape has never been painted. The human being must not be there, but must have found himself entirely in the landscape” (p. 51), the ‘noisy self’ must be ‘silenced’.
How many people participate in the “exercise society” just to laugh and get emotional, without having “entered the landscape”, without the slightest contact with the divine, needing noise, food and drink to fill the emptiness they have in their souls and not in their stomachs?
Only an exercise in true asceticism can lead us to Love, the synthesis of the virtues, but without forgetting them: it introduces us to balance, courage, listening and sincere social relationships.
HAN, B. C. Vita Contemplativa (Vita Contemplativa: or on inactivity). Trad. By Lucas Machado. Brazil. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 2023.
