About the modern and God
22
Aug
If it is true that the religious discourse of our days borders on insanity, it is also true that what modernity thought and still thinks about God is practically unknown.
Born to a family of Lutheran pastors, Nietzsche did not speak of the Death of God as his shallow reading thinks, they did not read the Gay Science where the philosopher proclaims “The mad man – You have not heard of that mad man who in the middle of the morning lit a lantern and ran to the market , and began to cry out incessantly: ‘I’m looking for God! I’m looking for God!’?” drink the sea entirely? Who gave us the sponge to erase the horizon? What have we done, in untying the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving?'” is in §125.
He sought in the philosophy of the East: Thus spoke Zarathustra the lost mystique, but his work The Birth of Tragedy has striking passages where he shows the need to understand this way of understanding life, where he makes studies on the Apollonian and the Dionysian, where chapter 5 it is believed that this is where Heidegger starts to write the Origin of the Work of Art.
From Husserl’s Influence were born the philosophies of Heidegger and Edith Stein, who later became mystic, being Jewish became Christian and was a martyr in Nazi Germany, still under the influence of Heidegger is Hannah Arendt, whose doctoral thesis is “Love in Santo Agostinho”, although there are gaps that his contemporaries attest, it is a good read.
From Hannah Arendt came the meditations on Vitta Activa and Vitta Contemplativa, which the contemporary philosopher Byung Chul Han will take up again in his Society of Tiredness, not forgetting to touch on the Christian philosophy of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus (or Nazianzen).
He was strongly influenced by Peter Sloterdijk, who despite his atheism, in all his works the deep marks of the knowledge of Christian thought, claims the prophet Jonah to say that we all have a whale (Jonas when refusing his mission was devoured by a whale and returned to the beach) and a little Jonas, refuses our mission on this planet.
Byung Chul Han makes a very current diagnosis, he adds that the “modern loss of faith, which concerns not only God and the beyond, but reality itself, becomes radically transitory human life” (Han, p. 42) .
This is not a separate problem, it is an essential part of modern thought, refusal of the essential, adoption of the transitory, fleeting and frivolous life and of fleeting and ecstatic pleasures.
Han, Byung Chul. (2015) Burnout Society. Ed. Stanford Briefs; 1ª ed., Stanford, USA.
