Asceticism and social ascension
14
May
The idea of ascension is linked to growth on the
social scale, but this type of ascension does not refer to asceticism, that which morally and virtually (in terms of virtue) someone elevates.
The idea of access to social goods and public visibility is also not linked to asceticism, we live in a time in which social notoriety through modern digital media resources, advertising and the cultural industry have existed since the beginning of the last century, does not indicate a spiritual and moral asceticism, often being exactly the opposite (in the photo Philosopher in Meditation by Rembrandt, 1632).
The times of education for sociability, empathy and the common good are distant, now there is a confusing scenario where public visibility is mixed with sociability, empathy with modern mythology, there is no space for depth of thinking, or for astonishment. If faced with dark facts, everything seems to become a meme and reason for bad politics and bad social practices of polarization often justified only by “us against them”.
It is almost impossible to talk about asceticism in such a strange and exotic universe, not to say something more serious, it is not a question of returning to children’s stories with moral lessons or fantasy stories of kindness and innocence in a difficult and competitive world, this is also harmless However, if we do not rise spiritually we become worse and less humanized every day. An asceticism that takes us to a higher level of civilization is not only desirable but also makes the civilizing process possible and more fruitful for everyone.
When talking about a despiritualized asceticism, Peter Sloterdijk highlights the “exercise society” that is more destined for tension and competition than for leisure and human and social progress for all, also Edgar Morin when talking about resistance of the spirit, talks about a stance of hope contrary to the social polycrisis we are experiencing.
The reading we are doing of Heidegger read by Byung-Chul Han, penetrates this spirit: “Modern man”, the consumer of beings, staggers because of his “drunkenness of experiences” (pg. 243) from one unusual thing to another , it lacks the ascetic look of “astonishment” (pg. 244), that is, not acquiring anything unusual as fact.
This look of amazement that comes from Aristotle’s philosophy, capable of capturing our attention in the “untrodden space between” (pg. 246) that is capable of reviewing the “middle”.
There is a “suffering” in this that is an imprisonment of “not knowing how to get in or out” (pg. 247) and in such suffering there is a correspondence with what must be captured, what must be learned where “thinking is a capturing that suffers” worked by Heidegger to allow man to think between beings, which takes the affective tone.
When also criticizing the child’s astonishment, which he calls the first beginning, he emphasizes that he is not in this first house: “sustained breathing can mean the trans-epochal a priori of thinking”, (pg. 249).
Byung-Chul remembers that Lévinas dedicates his “main work” (as he considers it): autrement qu’etre or au-delà de essence (beyond being or beyond essence) to astonishment, which frees the imprisonment of the self to the in-itself (a category dear to Hegel), which places the self in “a passivity that is more passive than the passivity of matter” (pg. 250, citing Lévinas).
Although he recognizes that there is this astonishment in postmodernism, Lyotard reminds us (Das inhumane, pg. 163) quoting Boileau in “The sublime and the avant-garde”, the “sublime is, strictly speaking, nothing that can be proven or shown, but something wonderful that grabs, that shakes and that moves with sensitivity”.
He concludes this chapter, which he called “The Sustained Breath”, that “astonishment imposes silence on the subject and his work of synthesis”, and concludes: “It is a breath of thought that perseveres before synthesis, without stopping thinking” ( p. 252).
Han, B.C. (2023) Coração de Heidegger: sobre o conceito de tonalidade afetiva em Martin Heidegger (Heidegger’s heart: on the concept of affective tonality in Martin Heidegger). Transl. Rafael Rodrigues Garcia, Milton Camargo Mota. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes.
