Ontology, idealism and truth
16
Oct
Heidegger’s thought must start from the question
of Spirit in Hegel, read by Byung-Chul in Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit “in terms of the forgetfulness of being” (Heidegger’s central question), he sees it as an “arid self” that finds “its limitation in the being that meets it” (Han, p. 334 quoting Hegel).
Although he recovers Hegel, in part, in the epigraph to the last chapter: “truth is the whole”, he re-discusses dialectics and its metaphysics in idealism: “in relation to ‘just being’, which empties it to a name ‘that no longer names anything’, natural consciousness … when it becomes aware of being, assures itself that it is something abstract. “ (Han, 2023, pg 336).
Natural consciousness (seen in this way) “dwells on ‘perversities’ … “it tries to eliminate one perversity by organizing another, without remembering the authentic inversion” where ‘the truth of the essence of being is gathered into being’ (pg. 336 with quotes from Heidegger), which sees this as a step backwards and the forgotten, misunderstood ‘already’ (pg. 337), does not appear completely negated, it appears in the form of ‘not yet’ which is not a negation, nor a barricade, placed ‘next to the already prevents it from appearing’ (pg. 337).
There is a whole development in contrast to Hegel’s dialectic, more than a topic, it could well be a book, but the dialogue he engages in with Derridá and Adorno in the chapter on Mourning and the work of mourning, leads to his vision of the whole outside of dialectical abstraction, he says the concern with immortality, with death and with the work of mourning.
The “cardiographic” archive of the history of philosophy, in which the philosopher “works” to reverse the negative of being, is not the only secret in the heart of Plato or Hegel (p. 384).
This is what will form the basis of his “work of mourning”: “to be capable of death as death”, that is, to be capable of mourning, this “tragedy” “differs radically from the noisy work of mourning of the Hegelian dialectic” (Han, 2023, p. 385).
“Tears free the subject from his narcissistic interiority … they are the spell that the subject casts over nature“ (Han, p. 394) now quoting Adorno, and the author states that ‘Aesthetic Theory is the book of tears (idem) and that contrary to Kant, and that ’the spirit perceives, in the face of nature, less its own superiority than its own naturalness” (p. 395).
“The aesthetic experience shakes the narcissistic subject who thinks he is sovereign and causes the hardened principle of the ‘I’ to crumble … the tear of the shaken and moved subject proves to be capable of truth” (p. 395).
Capable of truth, of the infinite and for those who believe in God, not a God of passing goods and false joy, but that of the already, but not yet, that beyond the pain and transience of temporal things.
Han, B.C. (2023) Coração de Heidegger: sobre o conceito de tonalidade afetiva em Martin Heidegger. Transl. Rafael Rodrigues Garcia, Milton Camargo Mota. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes.
