Lack of balance and Being
17
Oct
An analysis of Western culture cannot be
complete without an understanding of Anger. Various authors have analyzed the issue. Byung-Chul Han recalls that one of the first words in Homer’s Iliad begins: “Aira, Goddess, celebrates the wrathful Achilles, who brought so many sorrows to the Achaeans and cast countless souls into Hades,” but that’s not all.
Aristotle defines anger as: “a desire, accompanied by pain, for perceived revenge, on account of a perceived disregard for an individual or his neighbor, coming from people from whom disregard is not expected” (2.2.1378a31-33) wrote in Rhetoric, but Peter in his essay Anger and Time reframes this psychoanalytical view that reduces the feeling to a mere escape valve for unfulfilled desires and rediscovers it as a 21st century political concept.
The author says: “While the link between spirit and resentment was stable – the demand for justice for the world – whether beyond earthly life or in the history that takes place – was able to take refuge in fictions that have been dealt with in detail here: in the theology of the wrath of God and in the world timotic economy of communism” (Sloterdijk, 2021), which takes on a controversial theme (image is part of book cover).
What is certain is that there is anger on both sides, and the “already” but “not yet” that was discussed in the previous post does not reside in them, because both thoughts are affiliated with modern idealism, and this is the central criticism of Kant and Hegel’s German idealism, they do not point to a new idealism.
In it there is an absence of pain, which precedes com-passion, more than an act of mercy (miseri cordis, of the heart), it is an act of adherence and justification of the existential peripheries, where the pain of justice resides, but as existential it also resides in disillusioned and tired hearts.
Contemplation and the already and not yet, which reaches both the earthly and the divine spheres, requires a vita activa which is that of psychological, family and social equilibrium which does not exclude the other, not infrequently those who defend only earthly or only divine justice, do not have a proactive action that leads to the encounter of pain, widely analyzed in Byung-Chul Han’s “Palliative Society”, eliminated pain by transferring to earthly or divine “paradise”, without our com-passion.
The balance of Being, which is already realized, but not yet (completely), has something to say about justice, the common good and peace.
Sloterdijk, P. (2021) Ira e tempo. Trad. Marco Casanova. Brasil, São Paulo: Estação Liberdade.
