Law, Pharisaism and the fig tree
01
Jun
The excess of legalism and rules kills life, the fig tree is a tree that
is long “dry” and then the leaves and fruits leave, but for some time it seems dead.
Pharisaism are those moral, religious rules and in our time “from the state” that has become a god, who kills life in the desire to control it, Petr Sloterdijk wrote about it in “Rules for the human park”, although it does not agree with all, in essence his diagnosis is correct, except for the fact that he made a “religion” out of this dispute.
His proposals, which were a response to Letters on Humanism by Heidegger, which made me deplore him for a long time, gradually understood philosophers and theologians, that there was a conference at Elmaus, in Basel, which later compiled and turned into book.
Sloterdijk’s diagnosis that the human fig tree has dried up due to “domestication” can be clearly read in the excerpt from his book:
“What still domesticates man if humanism has sunk as a school of human domestication? What domesticates man if his previous efforts of self-possession only led, basically, to his seizure of power over all beings? What domesticated man if in all previous experiences with the education of mankind remained obscure who or what educates educators, and for what? Or is it that the question of the care and training of the human being can no longer be formulated in a pertinent way in the field of mere theories of domestication and education? “(Sloterdijk, 1999a, 32).
Here is the human fig tree, this is Pharisaism and its “religious” or “state” rules, after reading it again, I read at the beginning a sentence of Jean-Paul that Sloterdijk quotes by writing to Heidegger: “Books are letters addressed to friends, only longer, “and I understood that deep down he is a Heideggerian, but with a fair and well-placed criticism: where is humanism?
Our knowledge is anthropocentric, rejects even the technique that is human production as “strange”, we have at bottom a contempt for processes of change, those who criticize it as fascist must remember that it was the idea of ”strong” state that motivated fascism and dictatorships.
The idea of pharisaical authority that frightened Jesus in the biblical writings, while Sloterdijk also criticizes religion, recovers it by saying that there is a “non-spiritual asceticism,” which transformed temples into places of robbery and filth, is no different from the modern state, to all who worship and revere it, there is a general mistrust of politicians.
Sloterdijk, Petr. Regeln für Menschenpark, (1999a) Frankfurt/M. Suhrkamp. In Brazilian Edition:
Regras para o parque humano – uma resposta à carta de Heidegger sobre humanismo, São Paulo, Estação liberdade, 2000.
