Serenity and a sonata to Kreutzer
27
Nov
Serenity was the theme of a speech by Heidegger on the occasion of 175 years since the
birth of composer Conradin Kreutzer in Messkirch on 30 October 1955, but the same Kreutzer was worthy of a novel entitled Sonata a Kreutzer by Leon Tolstoy, which tells the dialogue about marriage on a train trip, in a position that is almost antagonistic because there is a climate of suspense between both that causes intrigue and pessimism.
Heidegger’s thinking will be demarcated by two of his writings: Serenity, 1955, and another from a conversation about thinking that took place on a country road, 1945, where Heidegger chronicles a long dialogue between three characters, the Researcher , the Scholar and the Teacher, on the question of thinking.
The starting point about thought can be What is metaphysics? Written in 1929, where Heidegger says: “it is by no means the most accurate thought,” precisely because it is attached to the ultimate goal of calculation, which ” reduces all countable to enumerated, for use in the next enumeration. The calculation admits nothing but the enumerable, “this comes against the neologism of the Vienna Circle, and algorithms.
What causes in thought this logic is the pretense of all encompassing and submitting, calculating thinking “can not suspect that all calculable calculus is already, and before its sums and products, in a whole whose unity undoubtedly belongs to the incalculable one that is subtracted from itself and its strangeness from the clutches of calculation “(Heidegger, 1943, 248).
There are, therefore, two types of thought, both being in their own way, respectively, legitimate and necessary: the thinking that calculates and the reflection (of the Nachdenken) that meditates. […] a thought that meditates arises as spontaneously as the thinking it calculates. Thought that meditates sometimes requires a lot of effort. It requires a long workout. It lacks care even more delicate than any other real craft. However, like the farmer, he must also know how to wait for the seed to rise and mature. “(Heidegger, 1955, pp. 13-14).
What Heidegger is going to explain in this work is that the relation between thought and will, in conflict and from where Nietzsche part to his reflections, is not evoked according to tradition, the representational thought that already has in itself one of the forms of the will.
According to Heidegger, the form of liberation of thought, which enables form (we would say thought) in the approximation of things, there is a non-objectifying, non-appropriatory approximation marked first of all by a “awake to serenity” .
It may seem, but it is not passivity, for the act which lies at the core of serenity is of a higher order than that of the usual human machinations which sends action, it does not necessarily imply activity as it is commonly understood.
For the thinker this elevated form, which although the day is not associated with meditation and contemplation, is mistakenly associated with a weakness of want, serenity, since it would be fundamental to restrain itself as a path of meditative thought is presented by Heidegger as the highest form of human action, so necessary these days.
Serenity is rather a restraint to mere impulse, anxiety and compulsory action.
HEIDEGGER, Martin. Serenidade. Tradução de Maria Madalena Andrade e Olga Santos. Lisboa: Instituto Piaget, 1955.
HEIDEGGER, Martin. Que é metafísica? In: Os Pensadores. Tradução de Ernildo Stein. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1973.
