The desert without inner life
30
Nov
Living only on the outside, projected onto the world, led to a
special kind of anguish, anguish is an aspect of philosophy, one that is linked to the concept of emptiness, a certain type of philosophy and some forms of the concept “God is dead”, yes because there is another one, one of them is men try in vain to kill Him as if it were possible, as if it were possible to deny some intentionality in the creation of the universe, yes it can be multiverse, but also for it there must be an intentionality.
The philosophical movement that gave voice to the feeling of “alienation and despair” came precisely from “man’s recognition of his fundamental loneliness in an indifferent universe”, the highlighted sentences are by Anthony Downs, an American political economist, who died in October of this year .
The reason why we must know the origin and development of certain concepts that seem just straw and without substance (because they are not observed in depth), is that they come to dominate a large part of contemporary life, such as the idealism that almost dominated all the isms of our time, including socialism and a certain type of Christianity (in picture the work of de Albert György).
The isms of our time are nothing but the rationalization of some form of idealism present in Descartes’ Western culture, passing through Kant to Hegel, his rejection based on the existentialism of Kierkegaard who insisted on the irreducibility of the subjective and personal dimension of human life, the existentialism took several forms, but it is the return to the question of Being and ontology that I consider an essential part of rediscovering the golden thread of the human spirit, or of the personal and subjective dimension as thought by Kierkegaard, part of an essential question that is “ because there is everything and not nothing”, and the nothing is clear is emptiness.
However, Kierkegaard also worked on the issue of anguish, which can be associated with emptiness or with the modern feeling of a form of alienation, his concept is different, it is the vertigo of freedom, advocated by modern man, it is through it that man feels repulsion and attraction, you can do anything, but not everything is convenient.
In “The concept of anguish”, Kierkegaard writes: “”a determination of the dreaming spirit (…) is the reality of freedom as pure as possible” (KIERKEGAARD, 1968, p. 45).
Soren Kierkegaard was born in Denmark in 1813 and had a life full of personal and family problems, in a space of twenty years he saw the death of two brothers and three sisters and then his mother, the disappointment in love with his fiancee Regina Olsen culminates in his own life what it expressed in philosophy.
The concept of anxiety became central in the development of existentialist philosophy, it is present in Heidegger, Jaspers and Sartre, but it has not been left out in previous philosophies such as Husserl’s phenomenology and rather in Franz-Brentano’s social psychology.
It is Heidegger who makes the issue of anguish a problem of everyday life, writes: “The being-to-death is, essentially, anguish. This is undoubtedly witnessed, although “only” indirectly, by the already-characterized para-to-death being, at the moment when anguish becomes a cowardly fear and, overcoming it, denounces the cowardice of anguish. (HEIDEGGER, 1998, p. 50).
Therefore, for Heidegger, anguish is an existential determinant and it manifests itself in the daily life of being-in-the-world, in the words of Hanna Arendt, it is a “human condition”.
The issue comes up again because of the pathological form it took in the Pandemic, precisely the deprivation of freedom, see that Kierkegaard’s concept makes sense.
Heidegger, M. The Origin of the Work of Art. In: Forest paths (Holzwege). Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1998 (in portuguese).
Kierkegaard, Soren. The Concept of Anguish. Lisbon: Hemus editora, 1968 (in portuguese).
