The disenchantment of the world and hope
10
Jun
War is the height of disenchantment, but it
is reproduced in narratives, intolerance and small everyday wars that cause the expulsion of the Other, especially when there are different interpretations and visions of what the “facts” are, but they use small wars hidden in their narratives and in a restricted context where it is valid.
The disenchantment of the world, now taken up by the crisis in Byung-Chul Han’s narration, was once the theme of Max Weber who referred to the phenomenon as a process in which the modern subject began to strip away customs and beliefs based on inherited traditions or learned under the fixed pillars of religions or “magic”, nothing more convergent with Han, however it is important to understand how this penetrated the language.
To be coherent with the theme, the final chapter of the Narration Crisis (there is another one in I know it is Storyselling, but I opt for the resistance of the spirit), which we posted notes on last week, begins with the narration of Peter Nadás, of a village that gathered around a large wild pear tree, and there they tell stories to each other, it forms a narrative community “that carries values and norms, intimately linking values and norms” (Han, 2023, p. 121), in it the village indulges in “ritual contemplation”.
Nadás says at the end of his essay: “I still remember how, on hot summer nights, the village used to sing softly […] under the big wild pear tree […] Today there are no more of those trees, and the singing of the village has become silent” (Han, 2023, p. 122, citing Nadás), and “this community without communication gives way to communication without community”.
He imagines like other authors, even cites Kant’s Pax Eterna, but his philosophy also constructed the modern narrative, and says as Edgar Morin dreamed and imagines a radical universalism “a global family” beyond nation and identity (pg. 125 and says “poetry elevates each individual through a peculiar connection with everything else” quoting Schriften Novalis, and this narrative community rejects the exclusionary narrative of identity.
“Political action in an emphatic sense presupposes a narrative” (pg. 126) and presupposes a narrative coherence, recalls Hannah Arendt “for action and speech, whose close interrelationship in the Greek conception of politics we have already discussed [in this blog as well], are in fact the two activities that, in the last instance, always result in a story, that is, in a process that, however arbitrary and random it may be in its individual events and causes, it still has enough coherence to be narrated” (Han, 2023, p. 127), I remember in previous posts Arendt’s idea, also used by Byung-Chul of vita activa and vita contemplativa.
From the final chapter I take advantage of his “To live is to narrate. Humans, as animal narrans, differ from animals in that they are capable of realizing new forms of life through narration. Narration has the power of a new beginning” (pg. 132) which is a sign of hope for humanity in a growing crisis.
Han, Byung-Chul (2023). A crise da narração (The crisis of narration). Trans. Daniel Guilhermino. Brazil, Petrópolis: ed. Vozes.
Disenchantment, narration and pain
07
Jun
Chul Han remembers a very well-known habit in
many societies, which is telling children bedtime stories, I remember that it is old because they are famous: Aesop’s fables (ancient Greece), the tales of the Brothers Grimm, the stories organized by Charles Perrault and many others, Han will choose a little-known story (at least here in Brazil) by Paul Maar of young Konrad that he didn’t know how to narrate and his sister Susanne asks him to tell her a bedtime story.
The parents, on the other hand, liked to narrate, they were “almost addicted to it” and when the father finishes telling a story, the mother writes R for Roland on the paper and when the mother finishes telling the story, the father writes an O for Olivia, but the parents realize that Konrad can’t tell stories and send him to a certain Miss Muhse, he arrives at a small house and the lady who knows that he has come to learn how to tell stories asks him to go up a ladder and take a small package to his sister, but the The stairs seem endless until they meet a wall that opens like a door.
Inside it is all dark and he sees an owl with a strange voice and conversations and realizes that there is no floor and falls down a long path, finding Miss Muhse at the end who gives him another package and asks him to take it to her brother downstairs as he did not deliver the first one, Konrad is confused because he thought he had fallen to the ground floor, and he falls again into the “dark spaces” of the house and again Miss Muhse arrives who is now smoking a fine cigar and knows that he didn’t deliver the package and gives him another one again, he says “I’m not here to deliver little packages, I’m here to learn how to narrate”, she sees that she’s a lost cause, opens a door in the wall and says: “Happy sorting and all about bread” (she always changes the sayings) and this time he is back at his parents’ house (pages 74 to 77).
His parents and little sister are having breakfast and he says excitedly: “I have to tell you. You won’t believe what I experienced…”, Konrad’s world is now different and now his parents write K (for Konrad) on the paper they wrote down their narrations.
The disenchantment of the world is when everything is reduced to causality, facticity (today’s narratives say facts don’t lie, but under a partial interpretation), Walter Benjamin says that “children are the last inhabitants of the enchanted world” (pg. 79), I would say there is no more lightness, empathy and imagination in the “adult” world.
“Children today hunt for information like digital Easter eggs” (pg. 80), today the “lack of narrative interiority distinguishes photographs from souvenir images… photographs portray data without internalizing it… they don’t want to say nothing… “ and this is why I conclude that data may not be, and almost always is not, information.
It is even more difficult to understand what knowledge is as an experience: “the narrative is opposed to chronological facticity” (pg. 81), recalls Han reading Marcel Proust and also Benjamin that the aura is precisely the “distance of the gaze that awakens in the observed object ” (pg. 82) and will also remind you of Karl Kraus quoted in Benjamin: “the closer you look at a word, the further away it seems to be” (pg. 83).
The denarrativized memory is like a “junk store” here the author remembers Paul Virilio (Information and Apocalypse) being the “deposit full of all kinds of completely disordered, poorly preserved images and worn out symbols” (pg. 84), where one finds makes “a pile of data or information does not have a story. It is not narrative, but cumulative” (pg. 84).
This chapter ends in a very pleasant and sensitive way, after quoting excerpts from the works of Susan Sontag, Adorno and Gershom Scholem, paraphrasing the latter he writes: “The mythical fire in the forest has been forgotten. We no longer know how to say prayers. We are also not capable of secret meditations” (pg. 89) and I would say taking advantage of the topic Pain from the book “Heidegger’s Heart: on the concept of tonality” (see previous posts) we no longer know the meaning of pain, of affection and we have lost any notion of the “whole”.
Han, B.C. (2023) A crise da narração (The crisis of narration). Transl. Daniel Guilhermino. Brazil: Petrópolis, Vozes.
Narration, digital culture and orality
06
Jun
Still in the section on Poverty and experience,
quoting Walter Benjamin, Byung-Chul wrote: “We became poor. We abandoned all the pieces of human heritage one after another, many of them had to pawn a hundredth of their value to receive in exchange the small currency of the ‘current’. The economic crisis is at the door, behind it is a shadow of the next war” (Han, 2023, pg. 37-38, citing Poverty and Experience by Benjamin), it was the threshold of the 2nd. World War.
In which modernity sums up happiness, the author explains “happiness is not a one-off event (pg. 43), today “when everything throws us into a current frenzy, when we are in the middle of the storm of contingencies, we are unhappy” ( pg. 44), recalls Marcel Proust “In Search of Lost Time” who understood the “rescue of the past as the narrator’s task” (pg. 45) and modern life as “a muscular atrophy”.
Disagreeing with Heidegger to reaffirm its contextual importance (also for today): “Being and time is not a timeless analysis of human existence, but a reflection of the temporal crisis of modernity” (pg. 45), “the being-itself of Heidegger is prior to the narrative context of life produced later. Being-a-i assures itself before telling itself a coherent story regarding the world of interiority” (pg. 47) and this explains the book we previously posted here, Heidegger’s Heart.
After a speech on some pages about new media: Phono sapiens, selfies, Facebook, it is a fixation of the author even though he recognizes Benjamin before this, even though he says correctly: “they are aligned in a syndetic way, without any narrative nexus” (pg. 51), recognizes that “Human memory always makes choices. In this aspect, it differs from a database”, a fundamental technical precision, which some people sometimes confuse with data without information, information without knowledge.
It predates even the emergence of the Gutenberg press and belongs to oral culture: “autobiographical narration presupposes a subsequent reflection on what was experienced, a work of conscious remembrance” (pg. 53) while “the quality of the data is better as they contain less consciousness” (idem), but it is necessary to remember the semantic search, the linking of data (linked data) and the use of Artificial Intelligence for narration that makes possible a consciousness beyond the “libidinal conscious” (idem) without ethics or morals.
Without mentioning oral culture, but the excerpt reminds her: “if everything that was experienced is present without distance, that is, it is available, the memory reappears” (pg. 56) and adds: “a flawless reproduction of the experience does not is a narrative, but a report or record” (ibidem) and remembers that whoever wants to narrate or remember “needs to be able to forget or let a lot of things slip” (pg. 57) and cannot be talking about anything other than the written culture, as oral culture is capable of forgetting details but will always remember what is experienced and through it remember the essentials and remember tradition.
Remembering the masters of cultures, their teachings and experiences is nothing other than oral culture, written culture is a “database”, a memory without reflection.
Han, B.C. (2023) A crise da narração (The crisis of narration). Transl. Daniel Guilhermino. Brazil: Petrópolis, Vozes.
Experience, narratives and vision of the future
05
Jun
In the chapter that Byung-Chul Han deals with
the poverty of the experience of modernity, remembering that it is not just about digital life as it predates it, he tells the fable of a man on his deathbed who tells his children that there is a treasure hidden in his vineyard (pg. 31), and after digging a lot, they finally understand that the vines in those lands produced more than any other (Han, 2023, pg. 31), in an important detail he explains that “it is characteristic of the experience that it can be narrated from one generation to the next” and this is what has been lost in the storytelling narrative.
Narration presupposes tradition and continuity (Han, pg. 34) and it is this that “creates a historical continuum” while the poverty of experience is “animated by the pathos of the new” that “generalizes the new barbarity and transforms it into the principle of the new: Descartes belonged to this lineage of builders, who based his philosophy on a single certainty – I think, therefore I am – and started from it” (pages 34 and 35).
Paul Scheerbart reminds us that in his essay Glass Architecture “he talks about the beauty that would arise on Earth if glass were used everywhere” (pg. 38) and curiously, modern architecture is full of this “metaphor” (I also remember here the architecture (pg . 38), and they give a special aura as a means to the future, but as Han explains: “the future is an appearance of something far away” (page 39) that only the present cannot confer, this is a ‘feeling’. beginner”, which does not stay on the surface and which conceives a “different way of life”.
Exhausted late modernity is alien to the “beginner’s feeling” (page 40), “we profess nothing”, we are “comfortable” with convenience and like (idem), “information fragments time… reduced to a strip narrow view of current things”, I would add that we do not have reading, knowledge and reflection on previous things that made the history of culture and knowledge itself, not reduced to the Cartesian fraction of reason.
We are in a culture of “problem solving… in the form of compressed time” (page 41), but the author does not let slip a vision of the future: “life is more than solving problems… those that only solve problems no longer have a future… the narration reveals the future, only it gives us hope” (page 41).
The narrative is present in the background of different cultures, from religious to social and political, people built them more than their rulers and emperors who succumbed to them, Napoleon did not leave an imperial France, but a resigned one, Bismarck and Hitler did not leave a superb Germany, but knowing where philosophy found its roots, the colonial submission of the Americas and Africa, in the East there are still lapses of colonialism, leaving peoples more fighting and in search of their own narration, there is life beneath the dust that dictators and colonizers wanted to reduce us, I also remember the Eastern and Western cultures of religious narration, they are no less important, they support them.
Of course, there is also storytelling in this environment, false prophets and “pastors” who seek religious enslavement, but the biblical and oriental teaching is different and as it is a narration it cannot be confused with stereotypical and segmented reading, they also suffered from Cartesianism and idealism, when these “fake religious people” who demand a “modern narrative” that takes account of current storytelling.
Already at that time, Jesus was being asked about the existence of eternal life. He remembers the burning bush passage in which Moses had spoken directly to God (Mc 1,26): “As for the fact of the resurrection of the dead, have you not read in the book of Moses, at the burning bush, how God said to him: ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob’?” and instead of denying the ancient narrative, it reaffirms that it is part of the tradition and that a new reality was already being written there.
Han, B.C. (2023) A crise da narração. Transl. Daniel Guilhermino. Brazil: Petrópolis, Vozes.
Violence , manipulation and resistance
04
Jun
Edgar Morin asked in an interview that when
faced with a situation of polycrisis, we face it with resistance of the spirit, strength of character, opposition to hatred and opposition to small dishonest acts, but the most difficult thing is spiritual resistance, the narratives that go from politics and religiosity.
Clarifying as we did in the previous post, that when using Walter Benjamin who passed away in the 40s, what he was mentioning was about the press being concerned with hot news and not always thinking and digesting in depth the “slowness” as proposed by Byung-Chul Han the facts of reality, says Byung-Chul: “Digitalization sets in motion the process that Benjamin, due to his time, could not predict… associates information with the press. The press is a means of communication that follows narration and romance” (Han, pg. 27), remembering that it is the romantic vision that begins a process of death of narration.
We had already mentioned in previous posts Karl Kraus (1874-1936), an Austrian poet and journalist who was a strong opponent of the 1st. world war, a spirit of resistance of the time, alerted the boiling nationalist and militarist ideas, of which the press was a partner, and saw in war a manifestation of humanity’s collective madness.
In times of spiritual emptiness, it is very common for a warlike and passionate spirit to grow, there is no shortage of exalted spirits without any reflection in all media, the order is to promote disorder, the moral order is to promote the immoral, this madness feeds on warlike and sick spirits, they need collective madness for their war madness to thrive.
In an even earlier period, the [disordered] information regime stated George Büchner (1813-1837), quoting Byung-Chul: “we are puppets, whose strings are pulled by unknown powers; we are nothing, nothing ourselves” (Han, 2023, pg. 29), now “the powers are becoming more subtle and invisible, so that we are no longer aware of it. We even confuse it with freedom” (Idem).
The poverty of the narration experience, also pointed out by Benjamin and cited by Han: “what happened to all this? Who still finds people who know how to tell stories the way they should be told?” (Han, 2023, pg. 31), there is certainly no neutrality, but between two warlike forces a power of resistance is possible that denounces them.
In biblical reading, give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar (Mc 12,16-17): “They took the coin, and Jesus asked: “Whose figure and inscription are on that coin?” They replied, “Caesar’s.” Then Jesus said, “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” And they were amazed at Jesus, because it was not an allied act but rather showing which side the power is on and which side are the peaceful men who truly want the common good of all.
After countless alliances with the Pharisees, in the year 70 AD the Roman Empire destroyed the second Jewish temple and whose reconstruction they dream of to this day, both lost, the Roman Empire also fell in the year 476 to the German leader Odoacer , the barbarians had already undermined the political, financial and military power of the Empire (in the photo the Visigoths sacking Rome).
Han B.C. (2023) A crise da narração (The crisis of narration). Transl. Daniel Guilhermino. Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes.
Narratives, wars and dangers
03
Jun
In one of Byung-Chul Han’s recent essays,
while the author remembers Hyppolyte de Villemessant, founder of the French newspaper Figaro and Walter Benjamin, essayist and philosopher who died in the 40s, the author does not fail to associate the modern narrative associated with new media, with storytelling called storyselling (product that sells).
Thus, instead of provoking a reflection on the major problems of today, including the escalation of wars, the problem is old: “the reader of a modern newspaper jumps from one piece of news to another, instead of letting his gaze wander into the distance, and linger there. The long, slow and lingering look was lost” (Han, 2023, p. 17), that is, there is no reflection.
So it’s about creating a narrative favorable to this or that ideological vision, logic and humanity don’t matter, even in the face of tragedies we are more busy (not all of them fortunately) in creating a narrative to justify a certain position than to defend a principle. humanitarian, there is this or that war, but all of them kill innocent people, all of them, as Eduardo Galeano said, hide desires for power and exploitation over the nation to be dominated, but great empires have succumbed despite all the arrogance and genocides.
The resurgence of the war in Ukraine, the threats to the last stronghold of Palestinian refugees, the constant threats to Taiwan, in addition to incursions into Africa and now even South America, Venezuela is once again threatening Guyana with intense troop movements and provocations between the USA and Iran, warlike spirits ignite and even good but innocent people embark on these narratives, there is no other interest in wars: looting, deaths of innocent people and inhumanity.
There is no shortage of meetings between nations in Brazil, Europe and attempts to sensitize governments to the dangers of this war escalation around the world, but they come up against partial and partisan narratives, few minds are aware of the serious and civilizing danger of this escalation. , around the world, armaments are the only response that seems to reach the rulers, and so narratives of “heroic acts” of warlike events grow around the world that should shame those who invoke humanitarian principles, with the UN being the wars and environmental problems that have led starve more than 700 million people.
Even for a biblical or historical narration, where the intention is to build a “whole” narrative, there is a call for humanitarianism, when Cain kills his brother Abel, the divine question is “where is your brother?” (Genesis 4,9) and the narration suggested by Byung -Chul Han is that of the Egyptian king Psammenit who was captured by the Persian king Cambyses, and after the defeat makes the king humiliate when he sees his daughter turned into a slave and his son being taken to be executed (Han, pg. 21), however the Egyptian king only felt when he saw an elderly and frail servant among the prisoners and “hit his head with his fists and expressed deep sadness” (pg. 22), so the narration, says Han, “needs no explanation” (Han, pg. 22).
If we are capable of long, slow and lingering reflections, it is not difficult to understand the danger of the escalation of wars, of simple people like Psammenit’s service who suffer and die for issues that they barely understand, and that the narratives do not explain, they only try to justify the unjustifiable: death, jokes and lies.
As the philosopher Morin states, it takes resistance of the spirit, we are gradually losing the sense of love, hope and solidarity and if we read and investigate the news and facts of the wars we will see that there was nothing in them other than great genocides, robberies and In situations of hunger and misery, it is necessary to resist hatred and violence.
Han B.C. (2023) A crise da narração (The crisis of narration). Transl. Daniel Guilhermino. Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes.
The narrative and its sunset
31
May
Modern thinking lacks a model for the Whole,
I would say that it even lacks systematic thinking, Peter Sloterdijk even states that it is not a time for thinking, it is a time of trends dictated by hashtags, Stories, blogs and reels (mass diffusion mechanisms using social media).
Byung-Chul Han states that despite the “inflationary use of narratives reveals a crisis of narrative”, paradoxical, however “there is a narrative vacuum that manifests itself as a void of meaning and as disorientation” (Han, pg. 9), before the narrations anchored us: “they assigned us a place and transformed being-in-the-world into being-at-home, giving life meaning, support and guidance, that is, life itself was a narration…” (idem, pg . 9), is at the same time deterritorialization and uprooting.
However, Byung-Chul himself lets slip, through reading The Narrator by Walter Benjamin (died in 1940) that this is before the new media, citing it as “knowledge that comes from far away finds fewer listeners today than information about the upcoming events” (Han, p. 17 quoting him), the reader jumps from one piece of news to another, he doesn’t linger there, “the long, slow and lingering look was lost. “(pg. 17).
Still quoting Walter Benjamin, he differentiates information more clearly from knowledge: “information only has value when it is new.
She only lives in that moment, she needs to give herself entirely to it and, without wasting time, she has to explain herself in it” (Han, pg. 18), curiously a thought prior to the 40s. He will go into the concept of information, so important in certain areas such as Information Science, saying that it [today] is “the means of the reporter, who scours the world in search of news” (pg. 19), there is no necessary distance from the fact that digests it and makes it knowledge, “the information withheld, that is, the explanations avoided, increase the narrative tension” (pg. 19).
The narrative crisis is not due to the new media that have enhanced them, but to the fact “that the world is flooded with information. The spirit of narration is being suffocated by the flood of information” (pg. 20), but what then is narration? Han quoting Walter Benjamin invokes Herodotus, narrating the defeat of the Egyptian king Psamenit to the Persian king Cambyses, after his defeat.
The Persian king humiliates him by making him see his daughter becoming a servant and his son being executed, but the Egyptian king remained motionless looking at the ground, but when he saw his slaves as prisoners, “he hit his head with his fists and expressed deeply sadness” (pg. 22), because by lamenting for the servants “they destroy the narrative tension” (pg. 22).
He mentions that for Benjamin, the first sign of the decline of narration is the emergence of the novel at the beginning of the modern era (pg. 23), with its condition of experience and wisdom, narration knows how to give advice “about life” (pg. 24), the narrative community is a “community of attentive listeners” (pg. 25), there is careful listening in it.
Modern political and ideological narratives are after curious, picturesque and spicy facts, there is nothing of wisdom in them, they move the public through the impact and rush of “hot” and summarized information, there is no narration, there is no attentive listening and when there is it is due to the ecstasy or the spectacle promoted, it is removed from the context of a narration.
Those who still exist in legalism and moralism, contradictorily with the daily life they live, present in the modern religious narrative, should remember facts such as the non-judgment of the adulterous woman (who should be stoned according to the Jewish custom of the time) and Jesus “does not judge her ” (John 8:3), the testimony of the sinner who sits in the back while the Pharisee sits in front and feels proud because “I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust and adulterers” (Luke 18, 11-13), and also Jesus’ challenge when healing a man with a dry hand on the Sabbath (Mc 2,4): “And he asked them: “Is it permissible on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil? Save a life or let it die?” But they said nothing”, the biblical narrative always makes this distancing a way of thinking and rethinking values, it is not Manichaeism and modern moralism.
The stories of pirates and the impressive stories of the Vikings, prior to the period of navigation and mercantilism and even of tax havens on islands spread across the globe, with the complacency of “legal and moral states”, where the deposit is deposited, are also narrated. public money stolen from nations and the people themselves by politicians.
Han, Byung-Chul. (2023) A crise da narração, transl. Daniel Guilhermino. Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes.
What is the universe made of and what is its origin?
30
May
Greek philosophers from the 6th century BC
believed that the four elements of all nature were: fire, earth, water and air, Pythagoras proposed a practically religious school that everything was numbers while Democritus proposed the atom and that they would have rounded, smooth, irregular shapes and smooth, being able to form an infinity of elements, but until the end of the Middle Ages it was believed that fire was composed of one of these particles: the firegist, we owe the chemical table to Dimitri Mendelev who in 1869 organized his chemical elements, previously the alchemist Henning Brad discovered that phosphorus heated with urine residue caused flames and Antoine Lavoisier in 1789 organized some elements into simple, metallic, non-metallic and non-metallic.
Current standard physics has established 7 elements: neutrinos, electron, quarks, photon, graviton, gluon and weak force boson, but there is a more mysterious quantum world that of superstrings, it seems frightening or using the physicists’ word ghostly (Einstein used it the first time realizing that there is a third state in quantum physics in which the element is neither nor is it, later called the Included Third).
The most convincing theory of the universe until recently was that of the Big Bang and an expanding universe, entropy, Stephen Hawking was its great theorist, although this theory already existed before, and thus proposed an “arrow of time” in his most important book. famous “A brief history of time” (1988), but James Webb’s discoveries called into question when he found galaxies and celestial bodies at the edge of the universe that shouldn’t be there, now even the arrow of time is questioned.
The important thing when looking at the universe is to understand where everything came from and whether this whole thing and intelligent life, which for now we only find on our planet Earth, had a beginning and more importantly, had an intention.
The biblical “fiat lux” seems to agree so much with the Big Bang theory, before atoms there were waves or “strings” created in the first 10−44 seconds (Planck time) and then subatomic elements were created, in the case of strings, everything It is initially formed by one-dimensional strings that would be divided into “open” strings (linear) and “closed” strings (in loop strength), vibrating at different frequencies that would give rise not only to the 7 elements, but also the molecules that initiate life.
Be that as it may, there was an initial moment, and the form of this “being” must have been preceded by a creative “being”, the paleontologist and Christian theologian Teilhard Chardin proposed that the entire universe would be the body of this supreme “Being” of the “being”, thus he should have a divine and a material (human) reality, thus he proposed that the universe is Christocentric.
It is not possible for the All to have emerged from nothing, and if there is an original form of the All, of some “element” the physical world is composed, thus there is a “Corpus” of this All, with the difference that He is the creator and all the rest created, but created with some substrate of its own Supreme Being, of course the theory for this is more elaborate, but its understanding is simple, we are part of a body, of a group that communicates, the idea of the individuation of the universe is not plausible, because at the beginning we were one thing: a small cosmic corpuscle, a set of vibrating strings (we could even think of a choir making a song), but there was a moment of creation. and Someone created it.
The all, the whole and the divine
29
May
After developing delicate and controversial subjects
such as pain, waiting in the very sense of hope, which Byung-Chul uses the philosophical term of “containment”, he finishes his book, which could be said to be his first philosophical writing, even though he did his doctoral thesis on Heidegger, with what must be the most controversial for today’s philosophy: the whole.
At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, physics, science and philosophy that seemed full of their “knowledge” took a reversal, the linguistic shift, but there is another one underway that is even more profound: the revenge of the sacred, After leading humanity to two wars, to the exhausting work of the “Society of Fatigue” (in English it was translated as the Burnout Society), idealistic arrogance wants to proclaim the death of God, the all or the whole is what, the last James Webb’s research appears to be unanswered.
Even the Big Bang theory is at stake, the arrow of time may not be correct, in other words, time may be a human abstraction, galaxies seen at the ends of the universe do not coincide with the physics of the Standard Model (in this case of Cosmology) and show that the concept needs to be revised, but let’s leave this to physicists and cosmologists, our biggest dilemma is still: “what are we and where did we come from”, translated into philosophical language: what is being, and what is Being of beings (or coming from particles and cosmic dust).
This is expressed in the Theory of Everything, the name of the film, based on the book by Stephen Hawking’s wife, Jane Hawking, entitled: “Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen”.
For a while we forgot this dilemma, addressed since the beginning of this series of posts about the reading of “Heidegger’s heart” by Byung-Chul Han, not just the anthropological sleep advocated by Foucault, but the idealistic sleep of the reason of our time, that which caused a forgetfulness of being.
The beginning of the chapter is a provocation, I believe, when quoting Hegel in the epigraph: “Truth is the whole”, since Heidegger and his rereading of Han return to that “turn” in which “the truth of the essence of being withdraws into the being” (pg. 337), where consciousness itself is already “the concern to distinguish between natural knowledge and real knowledge” (pg. 340), it is in the dialectical experience of pain: “the dialectical worker is a sufferer. He goes through an ordeal, exhausts himself in the power of the Absolute, and does so precisely to live” (pg. 346), the emphasis on living belongs to the author.
“Those who still speak of the whole today raise suspicions” (pg. 455) is the opening sentence of the final chapter, but idealism never abandoned the abstract notion of the Absolute, because it is an imperative of any theory to outline contours where the truth is valid, for This is the phrase in the epigraph of the final chapter, I think, but “in Heidegger’s heart beats for the totality from the beginning” (pg. 455), he expresses it in his pathos for everything: “What was said perhaps indicates that the present work intend to be philosophical, insofar as it was undertaken in the service of the ultimate totality” (pg. 456), but in contrast to the Hegelian, “the Heideggerian whole does not capitalize on the death of the particular” (pg. 457), if we want to return to physics is worth rereading by Werner Heisenberg: “The part and the whole”, where we see the thresholds of modern quantum physics, where there are several traces of well-defined philosophy.
Understanding pain, containment and anguish and identity in difference (we have already stated that it is not the idealistic difference), the Heideggerian whole is not a place of birth, not a place of origin, but a place of birth” (pg . 459), a “non-metaphysical house as a dwelling space” (pg. 459), we would say the dwelling of the Being, full and divinized.
And also, its mundane totality, is not contaminated by the climate of postmodern thought, in it one can notice the total lack: “of odor, landscape or nature” (pg. 460), “with the history of being Heidegger writes a certain metanarrative”, but it cannot be denied that “Heidegger’s thought also has metaphysical traits” (pg. 461), his philosophy “are not language games [like Derridá], nor speeches”. (pg. 463), for him there is the being of language, “language games would be an ontic phenomenon” (pg. 463).
We develop the question of the voice (see the post), but Han asks: “in what affective tone does today’s thinking place this voice”, is it not a response to that truth that dwells within every man? not following it Is it accepting pain, anguish, difference and dispute outside of conflict and war?
There is that inner voice, to those who know how to do silence and epoché, there is the Being that is the whole and that lives within us, but we have to go through pain, through donation and accept the difference.
HAN, B.C. (2023) Coração de Heidegger: sobre o conceito de tonalidade afetiva em Martin Heidegger (Heidegger’s heart: on the concept of affective tonality in Martin Heidegger). Transl. Rafael Rodrigues Garcia, Milton Camargo Mota. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes.
Renunciation, economy and joy
28
May
Byung-Chul theorizes that despite the difference
between Derridá and Heidegger (see our previous post) there is a structural affinity in their vision of mourning, which is characterized by the renunciation of the subject’s autonomy in Derrida: “No matter how narcissistic our subjective speculation continues to be, , it can no longer close itself to this gaze, before which we ourselves show ourselves the moment we convert it into our mourning or we can give up on it [faire de lui notre dueil], mourning, making ourselves mourn for ourselves, I mean, I mourn the loss of our autonomy, for everything that made us the measure of ourselves” (Han, p. 430 citing Derridá’s text “Krafter der Trauer”, strengthening of pain), this That is, they both have in common a vision of renouncing the autonomy of the subject, the “I” of idealism.
Here the important thing is not to let mourning work (let us remember the concept already seen in the posts about “work mourning”) it is replaced in Derridá by a game of mourning: “however, the happier the joy, the purer the sadness that sleeps in it. The deeper the sadness, the more it calls us to joy…” (Han, pg. 430-431), but Heidegger’s mourning, explains Han, does not kill death, trying to kill it results in something even worse: “ wanting to resurrect, violently and actively surpassing the limit of death would only drag them (the gods) into a false and non-divine proximity and would bring death instead of our life” (Han, pg. 431-432 quoting Heidegger).
Heidegger explains that it is “not a symptom that can be eliminated by psychoeconomic accounting. He does not have a deficient trait that involves work (of mourning).
This “withdrawn” or “saved” for which Heidegger’s “holy and mourning” heart beats is not subject to economics, this “saved” cannot be spent or capitalized, it is therefore that which is and characterizes renunciation, Han does not exemplifies, but we can think of humanitarian aid in disasters and wars, as it will characterize the identity of renunciation and gratitude as conceivable outside of economics, using Heideggerian terms “grievously bear the need to renounce” and promises the “unthinkable donation”.
A profound and wise phrase by Heidegger says, renunciation is the “highest form of possession”, it seems contrary, but we only really have what we can give because otherwise it is a commodity of exchange, and even more so renunciation becomes gratitude and “ duty of gratitude”, this pain increases and becomes joy: “the deeper the sadness, the more the joy that rests in it calls us”. (pg. 433), but it does not even become sublimation, which forces us to “work”, as it is the “inhibition of all income” and the “awareness of the emptiness and poverty of the world”.
Praise of misery one might think, is not a praise of moderate and continuous joy, different from the euphoria and ecstasy that is followed by depression, “the lack of the divine brings about mourning, goes back to an obstinate forgetfulness of being, in which Heidegger inscribes the divine” (Han, p. 433-434), but it is certainly not yet the biblical divine, but surrounds it.
The reward and joy of the Divine inscribed in the being, is that which renounces and gives, but knows that there will be a reward of receiving a hundred times more, not in goods, but in joy.
Han, Byung-Chul (2023) Coração de Heidegger: sobre o conceito de tonalidade afetiva em Martin Heidegger (Heidegger’s heart: on the concept of affective tonality in Martin Heidegger). Transl. Rafael Rodrigues Garcia, Milton Camargo Mota. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes.
