Month: July 2013

Hannah Arendt on human life

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Modern theories whose raison d'être is to blur the nature of man and thus give him a superabundant belief in his person maintain this permanent blurring. This permanent jamming uses the thought of Simone de Beauvoir on human life. Permanent scrambling, uprooting, infantilization… Man must be told that he is strong in order to weaken him, push him to succumb to all his desires in order to enslave him. Uproot him to allow him to believe himself sole master of his destiny. Vanity and pride will do the rest of the work.

"It is only insofar as he thinks (…), that he is a 'he' and a 'someone', that man can, in the full reality of his concrete being, live in this gap of time between the past and the future. »*

* Hannah Arendt, The Crisis of Culture .

Unamuno on human life

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“I don't want to die, no I don't want to, nor want to want to; I want to live always, always; and to live me, this poor me, that I am and I feel myself to be today and here, and this is why the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own, tortures me. »*

The strength of Unamuno's assertion is that it expresses the desire for human life beyond the slightest thought of pleasure. We are here in the presence of a quote that asserts itself as a challenge to the modern world when the theory of action as meaning can be used by all modern ideologies.

*The Tragic Feeling of Life.

Simone de Beauvoir on human life

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“To declare that life is absurd is to say that it will never have meaning. To say that it is ambiguous is to decide that its meaning is never fixed, that it must always be won.*”

Tremendous declaration of impotence draped in an expression of the will to power or how envy must regulate, rule life. This sentence is of course a revolutionary manifesto. Simone de Beauvoir defines the class struggle and all the actions of the left since the French Revolution: envy as an act of faith. Envy is always the daughter of immanence. Simone de Beauvoir tells us: “God is dead, let us now know that we are masters of our lives and that they are fulfilled in action. By acting in this way Simone de Beauvoir ignores religion but also ancient philosophy, she affirms that permanent struggle is the only way. This permanent struggle is maintained by envy; envy has this unstoppable force, it feeds on its defeats as well as its victories. It is the evil force par excellence. She faces life.

Simone de Beauvoir's philosophy of life is adulescent, as Tony Anatrella would say, and in fact it is a negation of life because it denies its quality and its thickness in order to resolve it into a permanent and pathetic struggle.

We also see the form of modernism. This action immediately becomes a negation of the inner life. Or rather it wants to be a replacement for the inner life because it is common to hear, by a spectacular reversal of meaning, that action is the inner life of the militant. We also understand that this declaration in no way wishes to find a solution, appeasement would be its end. She only delights in noise and violence.

*An Ethics of Ambiguity.

Pascal on human life

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And this excerpt from Pascal, avowed and forced intimacy:

“When I consider the small duration of my life, absorbed in the eternity preceding and following, the small space that I fill and even that I see, damaged in the infinite immensity of the spaces that I ignore and that ignore me, I am frightened and surprised to see myself here rather than there, for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who put me there? By whose order and conduct was this place and time destined for me. Memoria Hospitis unius diei praetereuntis* . »

Taken from the Book of Wisdom, V, 15: “The hope of the wicked is (…) like the smoke that the wind blows away or *like the memory of a guest who passes and who is only one day in one same place ”.

Tolstoy on human life

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This morning, I stumbled* — literally — on this passage from Confession which is a pure marvel and which announces The Death of Ivan Ilitch written seven years later:

“At first it seemed to me that they were gratuitous, inappropriate requests. I believed that all this was already known, that if I ever wanted to tackle these questions head-on, it would give me no trouble, that for the moment I did not have the time, but that as soon as I wanted to , I would immediately find the answers. Now these questions assailed me more and more often, demanding the answer with ever more vehemence, and as they all fell in the same place, in a multitude of points, these unanswered questions formed a single black spot. (…)

“It happened to me what happens to all who have contracted a fatal internal disease. First, we see the appearance of an insignificant symptom to which the patient attaches no importance, then the symptoms return more and more often and merge into a single indivisible suffering over time. (…)

“My life stopped. I could breathe, eat, drink, sleep; but I had no life, for there were no longer any desires the fulfillment of which would have seemed reasonable to me. »

It takes the quality of Tolstoy to express so perfectly this rise in power (which some might confuse with the will to power), this progressive invasion of anxiety. La Mort d'Ivan Ilitch, a condensed masterpiece of this masterpiece that is life, will perfectly give this impression of falling into another universe. In an innocuous moment life bifurcates and routs. Life is made only of the assembly of these intimate moments shared with oneself.

* By reading my notes from the very interesting little book by Monique Canto-Sperber: Essay on human life .