Unity or dualism
14
Aug
Dualism is an essential part of modern thought,
even if little or nothing is known about philosophy, and it has penetrated deeply into the human soul and created things through contrasts, not the one that came from Plato, the shadows of the cave where we cannot see clearly and not the clearing place of Heidegger’s search to find the forgotten being in philosophy.
Byung-Chul Han, when describing modern narratives, is incisive: “the new barbarian celebrates the poverty of experience: one should not imagine that men aspire to new experiences. No, they aspire to free themselves from all experience, they aspire to a world in which they can display their external and internal poverty so purely and so clearly that something decent can result from it” (Han, 2023, p. 35) quoting Walter Benjamin .
He will then say that they “profess transparency and a lack of mystery, that is, they profess a lack of aura. They also reject traditional humanism” (pgs. 35-36), clarifies, however, that the aforementioned book by Walter Benjamin “is full of ambivalence” and in the end, after a “certain” apology, modernity (the quotation marks are mine) gives way disillusionment and foreshadows the Second World War.
We could have freed ourselves from this “disease of modernity” (as Freud wrote) but Benjamin’s skepticism makes sense again, quoted in Han: “We became poor. We abandoned all the pieces of human heritage one after another, we had to pawn them many times for a hundredth of their value to receive in exchange the small coin of “current”…” (pgs. 37-38).
We talk about peace while we fight wars, we talk about unity and we are deeply divided, we talk about democracy and we come out in support of autocratic attitude and government, and perhaps the greatest of all sophistry, we intend to eliminate poverty and misery by filling our pockets, there is no coherence between discourse and attitude, it is about creating good narratives, and this started from the division between what is specific to the subject (not subjectivity but his soul) and the object (not objectivity, but the material use of what he produces life).
There is a lack of an “aura”, complains Byung-Chul Han, perhaps a spiritual one, the resistance of Edgar Morin’s spirit makes sense, but it is necessary to find a true meaning for this, what most men call religion is nothing other than justifying personal narratives.
It is possible to rediscover unity, dialogue and peace, but it is necessary to “disarm” the spirits.
Han, B.C. (2023). A crise da narração. Brazil, Petrópolis: Ed. Vozes.
