Being, Pain and Easter
15
Apr
This is a time that did not abolish Pain, because as we developed
in previous posts it is inherent to existence, but we condemn it to oppose it to Being and Happiness, the philosopher Byung Chul Han wrote: “Just in the palliative society hostile to pain , silent pains multiply, crammed into the margins, which persist in their absence of meaning, speech and image”. (HAN, 2021, p. 57).
Nothing is more paradoxical in post-modernity than Pain, so the Cross is imagined as a symbol of liberation and of life, one could even say: absurd, but Paul the Apostle warns: “For both Jews ask for signs, and Greeks seek wisdom; but we proclaim Christ crucified, who is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” (Corinthians, 1:23).
It is in this perspective that racial violence, various forms of exploitation and what Byung Chul Han calls “self-exploitation” are explained, we no longer need others to exploit us, we do it voluntarily, incitement to a daily life with the mark of counting and not of Being.
The Pandemic could be an occasion for solidarity pain, but it was another impulse for exclusion, for isolation, for the strengthening of barriers and individual anxieties, which exploded in an anxiety crisis, in various ways of ignoring the pain of others, the point of denying it altogether.
It took a while, but in the final battle against the Pandemic we gave in to fatality, to the delirium of public parties out of time, the desire to overflow and try to ignore the pain for the ecstasy of public parties.
What appears on the horizon of this delusion are even more hellish wars, desires for domination and more power, lives are ignored with almost always absurd justifications: it was inevitable, there is no way to stop them without weapons, etc. more wars, more deaths, more suffering and market crashes.
Apparently, ignoring the divine Passion, we are making great strides towards a civilizing, humanitarian “passion” (of suffering) and a greater abyss than that which would be to live and manage the pains of a sick civilization and postmodernity with a horizon dingy.
There remains the hope of those who believe in the solidarity overcoming of a dormant humanity, of a balanced civilization center that recovers not only the process of hominization but also its solidarity with nature and the universe we live in.
This is a possible reading for the Divine Passion of the one who for love endured human pain, only a “passage” through Pain can make us understand a new possible humanity.
HAN, Byung-Chul. (2021) A sociedade paliativa: a dor hoje (The palliative society: pain today). trans. Lucas Machado. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes.
