Pain and Being
23
May
We said previously that the chapter on the topic
of the Voice could be the final one, but as Heidegger saw it, and Byung-Chul Han was faithful, it is part of the development of the Being, when talking about pain, a subject that Han also dealt with in the “Palliative Society: pain today” and we have already made some posts, the way we treat the pandemic and now the floods that affected thousands of lives in Rio Grande do Sul, should be a point of analysis and understanding, in a society that does not want to look at this side of life: suffering and pain.
Not by chance, Heidegger addresses this when elaborating on Parmenides, where ontology is reduced to Being is and non-Being is not, to a logic A and not-A, with no third hypothesis, there Heidegger speaks of “a certain death (sacrificial ) of the human being: “But the supreme form of pain is the dying of death, which sacrifices the human being for the preservation of the truth of being” (pg. 321), so the sacrifice is not here, as “the sacrifice has in itself its own essence and does not need objectives or benefits? ” (idem).
In the previous post we discussed idealistic sleep, here Han quotes Foucault asking “is it a matter of a certain agony to awaken the thought of an “anthropological awakening”?” (idem), perhaps an anthropotechnical awake or even as we prefer an onto-anthropotechnical sleep, since the forgetfulness of being is not just a philosophical category.
When addressing the emptiness of modern man, also based on the reading of Foucault, Han recalls that Heidegger, when resuming the metaphysical category “subjectum”, which in “its essence is modern man is the “subject” and it is exactly here that Heidegger “criticizes implicitly anthropological thought” (pg. 322), it is according to Heidegger: “the continuation of Cartesianism”, Han quoting him: “With the interpretation of man as subjectum. Descartes creates the metaphysical presupposition for future anthropology of every type and orientation” (pg. 323).
Thus it is not man’s opposition to beings, but modernity’s mistaken opposition to language: “concern for language would be concern for death. Giving language back to man would therefore mean giving him back death, his mortality” (pg. 324), and it is also not about the ‘being’ or ‘non-being’ of the human being” (pg. 325-326 ).
It is important to highlight the calculating economy seen by Heidegger: “Pain is from ‘because’, not from ‘due to’… mourning does not lament, it does not seek to fill the place that was left empty… mourning without mourning is only conceivable outside of economics (VIII.3)” (pg. 328).
Pain is not the resignation of absolute interiority: “the subject who works on identity, returning to himself in his interiority, assimilating the world, is incapable of pain” (pg. 329), while other thinkers stopped in anguish or in the search through difference or even through the subject destined for an “absolute spirit”, Heidegger sees in pain a “fundamental affective tone of melancholy” (pg. 329), it is the tone of being… of finitude… of finite thought, “ it is the identical feature that, as the basis of a certain formal manner, supports every fundamental tonality occupied by some content, the main feature that, as the same, is the basis of the mode as the respective tuning” (pg. 330).
So pain, for Heidegger and I suppose for Han (he treats it a little differently in the palliative society), !pain is not the eye that cries, or the face contorted by hunger or torture”, pain opens a space in which thinking becomes possible for the first time… a space without anthropological traces, and from which the subject disappeared… thinking would be, a gift of pain” (pg. 331).
The conclusion of this topic: “the rift of pain drags the veiled march of grace until an unused advent of clemency” (pg. 332), which is why we venerate power, violence and the lack of vision of true peace, love outside the bubbles, selfishness and ultimately a lack of “clemency”, it may seem like a religious matter only, but it is the search for the essence of Being.
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.
