Subject: RE: so sub-lime
Date: Sun, 4 Aug 2002 13:25:07 +0200


> back to spirit-in-flames, the conflagration...
> but why "sufferance"? why cannot the flame be unfed,
> a fine thin kind of matterstuff that consumes as it
> lightens as it rises... sublime.

The spirit in flames fed by sufferance is a Heidegger phrase I
interpreted before. I'm not able, though, to explain its reasons. What I
know from Jung, is that the archetypal creator is a sufferer (be he God,
the artist or the craftsman). I don't know why is that so. For example,
Krishnamurti interprets sufferance as a part of our being which suddenly
requires attention. If it was pleasure to make us attentive, we would
die as the wired lab rats, by over-pushing the pleasure button.

We love our history exactly because it contains sufferance. It is
something we invested. A part of our being which we sacrificed. A
portion of time we understood to spend in difficult conditions. And now
we get the world welfare state which takes the richness of this pain
away. In fact, it only changes its place. The more bodily pain would be
eradicated, the more we would feel psychic pain. We would take pills to
bear that. But pills, though sometimes helpful, cannot maintain a
healthy society. The less we would feel pain, the sicker we will become.

> flames? why such an inflammatory image? the coming pyrification?

If one's house is full of dirt, dirt he does not see, dirt which he
cannot handle, dirt which causes disease, then the neighbors will call
the disease control and the cleaning people. The same happens within our
beings, and the alien guest who will call for sanitization is simply
what Heidegger called the overwhelming. The unavoidable. The tough frame
of existence. The to be.

> but, not just the alive endures: also the dead
> and the undead and the unalive -- i.e., beings;
> beings also partake of unenduring, of ending...

I love the book Ecclesiastes because it points to another order of
change, a change which is not futile, vain and vexation of spirit. At
the same time changing and enduring. He sees the end of beings as a
vanity, as something without fundamentality. It is true this
unfundamentality defines our daily existence, yet we can daily access
the world of thinking, a world which is not futile, it is changing and
at the same time enduring. Of course, this happens only if thinking is
fundamental itself.

> an unintentional but revealing mispelling [sic]:
> are we set loose from the earth? are we loosened?
> from what? to what? sublimity = loosening? from concretion?

It is true, we are given the here and now, and here and now he have to
live. But think of that unearthly satisfaction the abstract reasoning
instills into our life. Even men and women whom cannot think
fundamentally, they are still dependent upon dreams, upon the imaginary,
upon entertainment. We are only, in their respect, a superior kind of
entertainers. The entertainers of their entertainers. That's why we
need, for their sake, humor, and, for our sake, integrity and
seriousness.

Become what you are!
(cf. Martin Heidegger's _Being and Time_, § 31, and Friedrich
Nietzsche's subtitle to _Ecce Homo_)
 
Tudor Georgescu (no, not "become *me*", silly! :-) )

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