Posts Tagged ‘strong fear’
Overcoming fear by having hope
12
Apr
It is common to hear in everyday life, there is
no way, everything is really lost, in difficult days for all humanity, it seems impossible to believe in a future full of light and happiness, however, both in philosophy and in true spirituality there is a spirit of resistance: the hope.
So many times in history we seemed close to the end, the ancient empires, the great wars and the two recent “world wars” are not a mere chance, and they were also not without a lot of death, sadness and disappointment, but the worst thing is that we did not have the lucky to understand that scourge.
We don’t know how to deal with pain, with disappointment, with “no” and we want at all costs to be the winners in any dispute, even sporting ones that should only be a reason for joy and distraction, can become a war due to the lack of healthy spirit of competition.
In Palliative Society: Pain Today, Byung Chul-Han writes: “The palliative society is a society of enjoyment. It degenerates into a mania of enjoyment. The like is the sign, the painkiller of the present. It dominates not just social media, but all spheres of culture. Nothing should cause pain”, we want something that will immediately “cure” or suppress any pain or even a small amount of suffering.
The author creates a verb based on new media: “Not only art, but also life itself has to be Instagrammable; that is, free from angles and corners, from conflicts and contradictions that could cause pain. We forget that pain purifies”, and fear brings light to consciousness.
How to beat him? Have you ever stopped to try to answer this question? with Hope, not that of those who wait and do nothing, but that of those who stop and meditate on pain, also on those who suffer injustices, judgments and who should occupy our consciences.
The resistance of the Spirit, which Edgar Morin advocates for today, is also a spirit of Hope, because spiritual exercise would be worthless without a belief in a better future for all, of peace, justice and acceptance. the differences.
In the biblical narrative, when the disciples saw the resurrected Jesus “walking on the sea”, they were afraid and did not fully understand his iconic meaning, but the master said (John 6:19): “Take courage, it is I”, and approaches them , a new force came precisely after this “fear”.
Happiness, fear and serenity
10
Apr
Among the main guests of “Fronteiras do
Pensamento” is Luc Ferry, still little known in Brazil, and already with a certain exponent in Europe he also spoke about fear, one of our themes this week.
He defends a secular spirituality, which for me and other Christians is fragile, but some of his reasoning and comments are important, for example about happiness: “… it does not exist, we have moments of joy, but there is no permanent state of satisfaction… What we can hope for is serenity, something completely different. Serenity can only be achieved by overcoming fear” (interview with Fronteiras do Pensamento).
It classifies fear into three types: shyness (arises depending on the environment and society), phobia (fear of the dark, insects, being trapped in an elevator), in our view it is the only one that really encompasses itself within what the author works mainly: psychology, and the third is the fear of death (of the people we love and of our own death), in our view this necessarily refers to the finitude of life and man, it is only possible to transcend with a spirituality not secular.
He cites an important author, Hans Jonas, and his book The Principle of Responsibility, where there is a chapter called Heuristics of Fear, described as a positive and useful passion.
Through reading this author gives a positive reading: “Ecology inverts this philosophical tradition by maintaining that fear is the beginning of a new wisdom and that, thanks to fear, human beings will become aware of the dangers that exist on the planet. Fear is no longer seen as something childish, but as the first step on the path to wisdom.”
If we are not afraid of war, of an atomic catastrophe, of a desertified planet, of the hunger already present in poor people and countries, we will not have social responsibility, most of us (who do not experience these fears) imagine that they will never be affected, however it’s not like this.
He recognizes that religion also addresses this issue, but his secular spirituality states that: “except that the great philosophies are doctrines of salvation without God and without faith”, so the question remains how to overcome finitude and death, and whether the resurrection of Jesus is true?
Of course it is a question based on faith, but the men of that time saw, witnessed and gave testimony, so why not bet on faith as Pascal proposed, what would you lose with this “bet”, of course it is important to go further, but it could be a first step.
What do I gain today with this bet, is a simple answer, more peace and more conviction of the possibility of peace, of not needing to destroy to discover that we chose death and fear?
Luc Ferry – A boa vida – YouTube
The anguish, the finite being and the fear
18
Jun
Anxiety, as an essential category, is the most significant temporal fact
of our existence, the fact that man has an end, that he dies and his existence ends, it is from there that Heidegger works on another concept which is the being-for- the-death [Sein-zum-tode].
Thus death is a limitation of the original unity of being-there, and it means human transcendence, the power-being, which contains a possibility of non-being, but here only as negation, “the end” of being-in-the-world it is death, this end limits the power-being, which is its existence, and limits the possible totality of Dasein (1989, vol. II, p. 12)
It is possible to separate fear from strong fear, leaving the first within the limits of the finite, and fear outside these limits, what the human imagination penetrates and projects as not being, beyond being-to-death, a being-for -beyond death is strong fear.
Byung Chul Han warns that like positivity, negativity is also dangerous: “it is defined by the negativity of prohibition. The modal verb that governs it is the ‘cannot’ (…) The society of performance, increasingly, is in the process of discarding negativity. Growing deregulation is abolishing this. The unlimited ‘power’ is the positive modal verb of the society of conquest (…) prohibitions, commands and laws are replaced by projects, initiatives and motivation. The society of discipline is still governed by the ‘no’. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, the performance society creates depressives and losers.”
Thus, it is possible to think of negativity as an important process, although it generates fear, and from it generate a process of fear, which, far from denying the prohibitions, demonstrates that they can lead us to broader results than those promised by performance, is the beyond-being.
Neither the transcendence of idealism that is mere projection of being onto the object, the so-called subjectivism, nor being-to-death as a fatal transcendence, but a fear produced by negativity that leads us to recognize limits, such as those that were imposed in the Pandemic and that do not generate death, nor are confused with the negationism that is the modal positive, denying that human life needs limits in dangerous situations.
The reading of the Bible of Apostle Mark (Mk 4,35-41), can, in this context of fear, reveal new things about being, the reading says that “when dismissing the crowds”, Jesus went with the disciples “to the other shore”, I would say far from the being-there of the pure positivity of being-in-the-world, the boat faces a strong wind and strong waves begin to fill the boat, fear takes over the disciples, they strong fear for death and they say to the master “we are perishing”, the Master says to the wind and the sea: “shut up”.
It isnt magic or a simple demonstration of power, the phrase spoken by Jesus explains a lot: “Why are you so afraid? Do you still not have faith?”, but they still felt “a great fear”, it is the anguish.
