Power, Anger and Time
18
Oct
At a time of threats and hatreds that call into
question not only peoples, nations and cultures, but even the process of civilization, it is good to review what we think of power and anger.
Sloterdijk (2006) had developed the question of Anger in current times, in a context of political psychology, values such as pride, ambition and vanity contribute to what can be called, in times of networks, a verticalization of social life.
The author explains that the social theories of “social stratification based on domination, regression and privilege” have been replaced by ideas of individual disciplining (asceticism, virtuosity and performance), which are seen as the causes of vertical differentiation.
This seemed obvious both to Michel Foucault, the sponsor of this interpretative approach, who in the 1970s denounced the intimate relationship between discourse and discipline, and to the vision of the linguistic turn, in his famous language games, which linked the latter to behavioral figures and opened up to sociology (and some half-philosophies) the understanding of latent rituals, typical of communicative games.
Half-philosophies because Sloterdijk will contest this reading and also various strands of Anglo-American analytical philosophy, which see language games as egalitarian and relativist, which they are not.
The so-called vertical tension in Sloterdijk’s work has great relevance for ethics and pedagogy, as it establishes a hierarchy between values, without which ethics is sabotaged, and the educator, in pursuing something higher than the student, must have something more in his soul and body, and this is his discourse on “the exercise society”.
What these authors draw attention to is the contemporary destruction of interiority, a theme that Byung-Chul Han goes to the root of, but which Heidegger, Hannah Arendt and now Sloterdijk have already drawn attention to: being-in-the-world has destroyed what was considered for thousands of years to be the most important thing: radically distinguishing oneself from this world.
In Heidegger this discourse is already present, pointing out that man as someone who no longer has an interiority that can serve as a shelter, for the fugitive from the world that he would eventually choose to be, modern conditions, opposes the certainty of a more than true life on the horizon of reality or in a hypothetical “end of the world”, this was written long before today’s apocalyptic and pseudo-prophetic visions, without seeing the absence of asceticism.
Hans Jonas wrote: “act in such a way that the effects of your action do not endanger the permanence of authentic human life on earth!” (Jonas, 2006) and Edgar Morin calls for a (re)humanized humanity, finally reversing the process of violent power, hatred and war.
JONAS, Hans. (2006) Das Prinzip Verantwortung: Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation. Frankfurt Suhrkamp.
SLOTERDIJK, P. (2006) Zorn und Zeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
