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Arquivo para August 11th, 2020

Between tragedy and idealism

11 Aug

The big theme during the pandemic, which attracts crowds is happiness, not by chance, since happiness was in everything that is now closed: the mall, the cinema, the houses of orgies and drinking, the simple ecstasy of being in a frenzied crowd for some frivolous reason, after all it is the frivolity that everyone wants to come back, there will be nothing great to penetrate the tragedy of a pandemic, it is necessary to find the culprits and punish them for banishing frivolous life and putting us all in constant tension, in fear and far from simple enjoyment.

Nietzsche wrote about The Birth of Tragedy, and blamed Empedocles for his death, but it was Hölderling who will write about Empedocles’ Death, it was he before Nietzsche who rediscussed the tragedy, and the tragic of the tragedy, in a dialogue with German idealism and that’s when he coined his most famous phrase: “where there is fear there is salvation”, almost in the same vein as Cassius Clay who became Mohammed Ali: “it is the lack of faith that makes people fear challenges”.

The pandemic is none other than the fact of understanding the limits of the human, the persistence of tragedy in our lives and destinies, and the fatality of death, those who never thought of it are those who fear it most now, it is never so close of all, but tragedy is evil, or the false sale of easy happiness, it is in it that the charlatans of philosophy, faith and even science without “label” rely.

The Death of Empedocles, an unfinished play, where Hölderlin worked from 1797 to 1799, in his poetic texts from this period, where he thought about the essence of the tragic is marked by a great antagonism, but above all the unification of antagonism with contradiction, where he makes it clear that the theme should be “the true modern tragedy”, perhaps not during the two tragic wars we face, but now in an endless pandemic.

In his analysis, Empedocles hates civilization, is a mortal enemy of limited human existence, cannot bear to live under time, suffers for not being a god, for not being in close union with the whole, and for a need that stems from his being deeper, I decide to die by throwing myself into the volcano.

He is less of a liar than the real ones of simple formulas for happiness, but tragic that he wants to be a god himself and that he would be more “noble” than to admit a God, killed not by tragedy, but by German idealism, after all from Fichte to Schelling, the great expression that transgresses the limit imposed by Kant on human knowledge, when considering all intuition, that which is sensitive to objects, becomes intellectual intuition and artistic intuition, being able to give an immediate knowledge to the absolute, of possibility revelations that are directed to the whole.

So in the essay “Foundation for Empedocles” says that tragedy is the expression of the “deepest intimate unity” that is exposed by real oppositions, the idea owes not only much to Schelling’s analysis, which defines the Greek tragedy as a reconciling presentation of contradictions of reason, but anticipates the Hegelian view of the tragic poem as a presentation of the “tragedy that the absolute eternally stages with itself”, but the absolute here is vague, ideal. In the “foundation for Empedocles”, Hölderling explains how the harmonious opposition between art and nature takes place, presenting the process by which nature becomes more organic and man, more agorgic, more universal.

The concept of aorgic here is fundamental, and the reading here is by Françoise Dastur “Hölderling, tragedy and modernity” where he defines it as “it is nature without organicity in its infinite uniqueness”.

The organic is the art, which supposes, on the contrary, organization and, therefore, opposition from the parties”.

In the aorgic relationship that can be found the pandemic, the culprit is ultimately the virus, the control of the virus is questionable until you have the vaccine, we were in favor of social isolation and at certain times of #LockDown, however it is in nature devoid of organicity, a virus that until then was foreign to the man who altered it and became hominating, putting the civilizing process in check, and nature seems to fight back what humanity proposed.

Hölderling, Friedrich. (2008) The dead of Empedocles A Mourning-Play.  NY:  State University of New York.