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Posts Tagged ‘ascese’

The human and divine ascension

27 May

There are many exercises and forms that promise asceticism, ways of maintaining physical and mental energies are useful and important, but the spiritual ascent, which is the source of true asceticism, requires moral, ethical, personal and collective training that puts us in a virtuous circle.

When criticizing modern society, as a society of fatigue, Byung Chul Han reminds us that active life must be complemented with a contemplative life, which does not mean looking at infinity or the sky, it is meditation and the collective exercise of including the Another is knowing how to listen from an inner emptiness, or, as philosophy thinks, a phenomenological epoché.

He introduces contemplation as: “If sleep is the high point of physical rest, deep boredom is the high point of spiritual rest. Pure restlessness generates nothing new” (Han, 2015) and then defines it as: “Modern Cartesian doubt dissolves astonishment. The contemplative capacity is not necessarily linked to being imperishable. Precisely the oscillating, the inapparent or the elusive are only open to a deep, contemplative attention” (idem), therefore it is not a tactical exercise but a “astonishment”.

We say that it is phenomenological because of what follows the definition: “In the contemplative state, in a way, we go out of ourselves, diving into things”, this reminds Husserl “returns to the things themselves” without pre-definitions or pre-concepts, a true epoché .

After the astonishment, rest: “Without this contemplative recollection, the gaze wanders restlessly from here to there and brings nothing to manifest. But art is an “expressive action” (Ibid.), and without it our civilization, he says, quoting Nietzsche: “For lack of rest, our civilization is heading towards a new barbarism. At no other time were the active, that is, the restless, worth so much.”

This restlessness proves the wars, the most atrocious political disputes, mockery instead of dialogue and the careful analysis of social proposals and needs, there is no “rest” for this to be done.

The divine ascension, after the Christian asceticism that comes to passion and death, our civilization seems to go through this as a whole, angels appear who ask the disciples who are looking to heaven (Acts 1, 10-11): “… heaven as Jesus ascended. Then two men dressed in white appeared, who said to them, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand here looking up at the sky? This Jesus who was taken to heaven for you will come in the same way as you saw him leave for heaven”, they stopped a moment before “amazement” and “rest”.

The barbarism of the pandemic, the war and a food shortage that is announced demands “astonishment”, accept that the mystery exists and that the universe had an origin.

HAN, B.-C. (2015) A Sociedade do Cansaço. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes. (pdf)

 

Spirituality and Asceticism

26 May

Not coincidentally, Peter Sloterdijk apprehends modernity as a form of secularization and collectivization of the life of the exercise, displacing the asceticism transmitted since antiquity from their respective spiritual contexts and dissolving them in the frothy fluid of the current biopolitical (or psycopolytics) communities dedicated to the training and entrepreneurship of the subjectivity.
It is not by chance that a current philosopher sees modernity as a way of secularizing and collecting exercise life, displacing the asceticism transmitted from antiquity, in different cultures, to the current contexts is dedicated to training and marketing from the daily practice of exercises through memes, rhetoric and a collective training of ideas (of the idealism).
Based on his ascetology, it is possible to perceive how education from childhood to adults is in a historical chain of training through selective immunological and anthropotechnical procedures, which announced by Sloterdijk a long time ago became wide open with the Pandemic, aimed at ripping the subject out. of your community.
In this way, “state athletes” or “domestic companies” are created in the direction of these exercises, what he calls spherological drama, and where childhood has to pay a price for the absence of protesting layers, that is, when the magic circles, the soap bubbles blown by the children’s ecstatic eyes, what he (Sloterdijk) writes in the Sphere I: Bubbles.
This kind of asceticism has nothing of spirituality or a true ascension (where the ascetic root comes from) so soap bubbles are the metaphor of this ephemeral universe, whose exercise reinforces habitus, but does not build a true spiritual asceticism.
The author does not develop it, he only denounces it as a de-spiritualized asceticism, as he himself does not believe in a higher reality, of true ascension, as described in Byung Chul Han’s book in his “Society of Bournot”, where he sees the active life and the contemplative life as two poles of Being, and he turns to the monk St. Gregory.
His term spirituality comes from Foucault’s analysis of the radical forms of dominant governments of “childhood government” which he interposes: “interposes between experience and the language that constitutes history and forms the spirit”, it is thus only a subjectivity.
Byung Chul Han, probably due to his oriental influence, takes another path of an effective contemplative life, which is more clearly expressed in his work: “The branch of time” ( ), where he states: “The greatest happiness comes from contemplative lingering in beauty, formerly called theoria. Its temporal meaning is duration. It concerns itself with eternal and immutable things, which rest in themselves. Neither virtue nor wisdom, only contemplative surrender to truth brings man closer to the gods” (HAN , 2016).
In Chul Han’s work it is possible to understand a spiritualized asceticism in a divine ascension.

HAN, B.-C. (2016) The scent of time. A philosophical essay on the art of delay (in portuguese, Lisbon: ed. Relógio d´água).