Evil and compassion
11
Jul
Hannah Arendt, in her work The Origin of 
Totalitarianism (original 1951) criticized Kant’s theory that defended evil as the search for satisfaction through self-love, and argued that evil exists for different reasons, such as greed, greed, resentment, desire for power and cowardice.
Byung-Chul Han’s genius analyzes Heidegger’s work from the heart and affective modality, but it is not something totally original, Kant confesses in his book “Conflict of the Faculties” that “because of his flat and narrow chest, which leaves little space for the movement of the heart and lungs, I have a natural predisposition to hypochondria, which in previous years bordered on the boredom of life (Han, 2023, p. 8) and hence in Kant a “yearning expands the heart, it defines him and exhausts his strength” (Han, 2023, p. 9).
Han uses the metaphor of Heidegger’s seamstress (Näherin) who “works in proximity” and is also a circumciser of the heart” (pg 10) and there “the heart of being-there” beats in the transcendental horizon, just as Han explains, in the late Heidegger that “contrition penetrates more deeply” and being-there separates itself from the being of there: dasein (p. 11).
Analyzing the affective tones of the heart and its close connection with being-there is more than discovering the interiority and transcendence of philosophical discourse, it is “Heidegger’s heart, on the other hand [confronted with Derridá], listens to a single voice , follows the tonality and gravity of the “one, the only one that unifies”, for him it is an “ear of his heart” but there is something strong spiritual in this, more than feeling or emotion.
The resistance of the spirit, in our times, Han says that Heidegger’s speech is quite temporal in the sense of the context of the second world war, it is the speech of peace, of announcing fraternity, of overcoming hatred and differences (it will recover the “Il y a” by Lévinas, and also Derrida’s concept of différance), to go beyond conflict and Hegelian dialectics.
It is necessary to circumcise the heart, this is the origin of the Jewish term, in the reading of Deuteronomy (10:16) cited in the epigraph by Han: “Circumcise therefore your spiritual heart; removing all carnal obstructions, and stop being insubmissive and stubborn!”.
Han, B.C. (2023) Coração de Heidegger: sobre o conceito de tonalidade afetiva em Martin Heidegger (Heart of Heidegger). Trans. Rafael Rodrigues Garcia, Milton Camargo Mota. Brazil: Petrópolis: Vozes.
