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Arquivo para April 24th, 2020

The road to Emmaus: from intelligence to the heart

24 Apr

The Part 2 of the book How to Live in a Time of Crisis is written by Patrick Viveret and in addition to a look of admiration for the work of Morin, the co-author, he has an even more generous look at humanity, despite the serious question of the chapter title : What will we do with our life?.
Viveret will link wisdom to love, quoting Martin Luther King: “We must prepare to live as brothers and sisters, or prepare to die as imbeciles” (p. 55), and complete it with “collective” emotional intelligence (it is an important differential) which is not psychologism. The author states “if we do not deal with the relationship between reason and heart, of the reasons of the heart that Pascal spoke of, purely mental intelligence, the famous science without conscience that is nothing more than ‘soul ruin’ as Rebelais said, it can build worse monstrosities ”(Pages 55-56). He said about the previous crisis what is much more appropriate for the current crisis: “humanity is in danger of prematurely ending its own history, but it can also take advantage of this crucial moment to experience a qualitative leap. “(P. 56) We cannot look at millions of deaths and say, thankfully it was not with me, or a little more humanly, we cannot even mourn the lost ones.

Numbers parade coldly without authorities touching each other, there will probably be 3,000 dead at the peak of the curve in São Paulo, but we can think of opening the trade little by little, in Wuhan where the crisis began they hoped there would be no death to open, but here we think that there is no way to save lives, they say the economic cost can be high, but how much does a life cost?

The crisis may be worse than we imagined, yesterday Wuhan’s patients tested positive again, I think we will not come out of this crisis if we do not give what Morin said and Viveret reaffirms: “We can only reach this if we face the issue of inner barbarism ”(P. 57), what Peter Sloterijk used as a metaphor talking about co-immunity, is now an embodiment, are we ready to help the Other to protect ourselves?

We need to produce wealth even if it costs lives, it wasn’t exactly a parable and yet that’s how it happened in history, but now it’s exactly a personification, figure of speech (like parables and metonymies) that is giving to what was “object ” of the Being.
The biblical passage that Jesus uses the personification is the road to Emmaus, when he walks all night apparently asking metaphors, and these will only discover the personification through the heart that awakened their intelligence (Lk 24,31-33): “In this the eyes of disciples opened up and they recognized Jesus. Jesus, however, disappeared in front of them.
Then one said to the other, “Wasn’t our heart burning when he spoke to us on the way, and explained the Scriptures to us?” At that very hour, they got up and returned to Jerusalem where they found the Eleven gathered with the others. ”
This is not an apology for religion, just to think that we often do not hear what is said to us as clearly as possible, but our intelligence is not linked to the heart.