Delay and the meaning of life
25
Feb
Just like any appreciation of art, any
narration that is not a fragmented narrative, requires a sense of appreciation, sensitivity and empathy and this means a delay in the time of view, Byung-Chul Han wrote: “the world is loaded with meaning. The gods are nothing more than bearers of meaning” (Han, 2016, p. 25), I’m not looking at life as a pantheist here, but dialoguing with any possibility of contemplation.
The masters of contemplation were masters of taking their time and “appreciating” life (read Vita Contemplativa by Byung-Chul Han), for this appreciation we must go against the current world where “narrative creates the world of nothingness” (p. 25).
Han reveals the relationship we have with the senses today: “Here [and now] everything has meaning is the eternal repetition of the same, the reproduction of what has already been, of the imperishable truth. This is how prehistoric man lives with a present that lasts” (Han, 2016, p. 26), a present that is not an update but a repetition, which is why there is confusion with the virtual, which in the etymological sense of the word is that which is already potential, and not the same.
Its deeper meaning also reveals the post-truth: “time will be defactified (defaktiziert) and, at the same time, denaturalized (entnaturalisier) (Han, 2016, p. 28) and the revolution today refers to a defactified time, i.e. a return to previous models that do not correspond to current problems and realities, which is why it is necessary to falsify it.
Byung-Chul separates the time of orality from history by understanding “the mythical that functions as an image”, and sees the history of the Gutenberg galaxy as one that “gives way to information” (Han, 2016, p. 30), to give it an unprecedented definition: “in reality, information presents another paradigm. Within it dwells another very different temporality. It is a manifestation of atomized time, of a time of points (Punkt-zeit)” (Han, 2016, p. 31), without having read Stephen Hawking’s ‘information paradox’ as a prediction of ‘energies’ escaping from the black hole.
It is necessary to separate the cosmological reality of this information, the megatelescope James Webb detected these “energies” from the reality of atomized and fragmented information, there is no contextualization of thought, its etymology and its contextual meaning, a world of denaturalized “information” as Han points out.
All this isn’t philosophy, it’s the daily information consumption of haters, opposed to the culture of peoples and nations, due to its fragmentation and the lack of a meaningful narrative.
That’s why anxiety, the consumption of low-level information, isn’t just disinformation, because those who proclaim it don’t look for the etymological, social roots of the thoughts they have constructed and which can make sense of them.
*defatikiziert: could be translated as in-fact, but the translator was careful to change it (de is “not”).
Han, Byung-Chul. (2016) O Aroma do Tempo: um ensaio Filosófico sobre a Arte da Demora, Lisbon. Ed. Relógio d´Água.
