Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

The book chapter on the Voice in Byung-Chul Han’s “Heidegger’s Heart: On the Concept of Affective Tonality”, this Voice could be final (the chapter too), but as Heidegger saw it it was more of an inner Voice than a relationship with the divine, and Han was faithful to him, for him it is part of the development of the Being, also when talking about pain, a subject that Han dealt with in the “Palliative Society: pain today” (we made some posts), remembering the way we treat the pandemic and other scourges 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” (Han, 2013, pg. 321), so the sacrifice is not here, as “Does sacrifice have its own essence and does not need objectives or benefits? ” (idem) and so this should be guided by something beyond the earthly, the merely human.
Han, quoting Foucault, asks that “is it a matter of a certain agony to awaken thought from an “anthropological sleep”?” (idem), perhaps an anthropotechnical awakening or even as we chose an onto-anthropotechnical awakening, since the forgetfulness of being is not just a philosophical category, there is something transitory in it, not infinite and not open.
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 assumption for future anthropology of all types and orientations” (pg. 323), the categories subject and object are characteristic of modernity.
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 ).
For Heidegger, the subject is reflected in the world; “the image of the world is in a way its own mirror image” (pg. 326), which is why it hides the being, whereas pain “tears apart subjective interiority. It is not completely lost. Pain is associated with a peculiar concentration, which, however, is not established as a subjective interiority” (pg. 327).
Although the author and Heidegger do not say so, this is why “idealistic sleep” exists, where subjectum and being are divided, and “in pain, thinking is concentrated on what gives thought… in the concentrated dispersion of pain, the thinking by turning outward learns the exterior by heart – this side of knowledge and science, which would enable assimilating internalizing learning” (pg. 327).
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)” (quoted in Han, pg. 328).
Han B.C. (2023) Heidegger’s Heart: on the concept of affective tonality in Martin Heidegger. Trans. Rafael Rodrigues Garcia, Milton Camargo Mota. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes.