Clearing and being-in-the-world
22
Aug
A superficial reading of ontology is one that
imagines being as pure contemplation or what is worse as an insurmountable human condition. Hannah Arendt’s reading of the Human Condition says something else: it concerns the conditions that man imposes on himself to survive, that which can supply man’s existence and which is not only linked to his materiality.
His tutor and from whom he was greatly influenced, Martin Heidegger states that being-in-the-world is a being in a certain temporal situation (hence Being and Time), but that it must always be open to becoming something new, giving life is an existential characteristic, but as a second trait, not as an essence as in materialist or nihilist ontology.
By systematizing the human condition into three aspects: labor, work and action, Arendt separates each one in a particular way: labor is linked to the biological process of human life, work is the activity of transforming natural things into artificial ones, for example, we remove the wood of the tree to build beds, cabinets, tables, etc. and finally action synthesizes our social activities and they ultimately reflect how we conceive this life.
Thus Hannah Arendt will divide human life into Vita Contemplativa and Vida Activa, a theme also explored and synthesized from the point of view of philosophical ideas by Byung-Chul Han.
So much labor, work and action are fused in what becomes our Active Life, we dealt in the previous post with the criteria of efficiency and productivity that this life reached in Modernity and its questioning, however the contemplative life is complementary to this, only in the reasoning of antiquity classicism and that modernity has explored, is that we dismiss the contemplative life as something unnecessary or even fanciful.
In Socrates’ reasoning, if man is only for eating, sleeping, having sex, then he is not a man, but an animal, from which Aristotle’s shallow reasoning comes: man is a political or social animal, that is not what characterizes Aristotle’s Zoe, is the fact that he is just an animal.
Heidegger’s clearing, therefore, is not just the possibility of man finding his Being, what he is in the world from an existential point of view, it is also finding the clearing and in it the new being, which lives in the light and not in the darkness, it is the Plato’s cave now under the gaze of a dark cloud that shakes humanity in modernity.
Thus, glory, light and truth only shine within contemplation, not only that of great mystics and sages, but of those who humbly open themselves to the new, to the light.
