And yet, these trifling pleasures numb the imagination. It becomes more and more difficult for us to imagine the horrors, the struggles, the pains, that necessarily happen elsewhere for the sake of our privileged happiness here. The invisible links do not surface into our consciousness. With each trivial remark, a moment of opportunity, a moment of giving a prayer or letting our imagination soar towards the other, is lost. Philosophy reminds me of this loss. This is because of philosophy's shameless use of its own particular language that forces me to think in this way, to bring the wings of my imagination outward.
That is of course not to say that everyday talk is always silly. One needs solace. The point is that there is overabundance. Just like eating too much ice cream makes one fat and weak, so does idle talk numb the brain and waste our privileges. This was the point I wanted to make as a precursor to two quotes.
The first quote is from Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution by Rebecca Comay:
I see this aspect of confession quite frequently these days. In this short passage, Comay does a good job in capturing the disgusting and perverse pleasure of a naive confessant. I show you my wound, now you show me yours. As if the mere revealing of wounds would lead to their healing! Action is always required for forgiveness. There is no forgiveness via an idea. Yet through the confession, there is a collective illusion that something has been done. This pseudo-religious experience is severely criticized by Comay's reading of Hegel.Captivated by the prospect of easy intimacy, the confessant tries to draw in the other through his own disingenuous display of candor. This is the seductive allure of all confession -- its theatricality and chronic tendency to hypocrisy; it always risks succumbing to the lure of narcissism.
Comay, Mourning Sickness, 122
Just to be clear: this does not mean that confession is wrong or bad per se. Confession plays a part in getting me out of my slumber and solipsism. Only through experience do I learn the hypocrisy of confession, that confessing is chronically insufficient for good to be on earth. The worst is to let all my hopes float "up there," to mystify the causes of the pains in the world, to refrain from acting and to give in to a mental idleness. In order to resist this "seductive allure" and to keep in mind that action is always called for, it is important to first and foremost go through the experience of bad confession, in order to develop an anti-bacterium against the "lure of narcissism."
The second quote is from The Grounding of Positive Philosophy by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (yes, Germans had ridiculously long names back in the days!):
I think that this is the uniqueness of Christianity, and also the essence of the famous words of Jesus, that he brings a sword instead of peace on earth, that one must hate one's blood ties and love one's surroundings as neighbors. The Holy Spirit is the "new chain of events" which originate out of nothing. It is something that magically transforms the radical savagery, hatred, and antagonism of nature into a harmony of believers. This aspect of the Holy Spirit is not understood properly by some self-proclaimed "believers." Holy Spirit is not nature: it is not something which is laid before man so that man has a purpose without his acting for it. Holy Spirit is something which exists "for humanity."Therefore, if this becoming [of nature] has achieved any kind of purpose it is achieved only through humanity, but not for humanity; for the consciousness of man does not equal the consciousness of nature. But, one answers, of course the ultimate and highest purpose does not lie in the human faculty of cognition, since if nature is impenetrable to man, conversely, man is foreign to a nature that indeed continues beyond him and his works, and thus for which he has no significance. ... Man was a goal of nature only to the extent that he was destined to sublate [aufzuheben] nature within himself, to continue beyond nature and to begin for himself a new chain of events.
Schelling, Grounding of Positive Philosophy, 7
These two quotes are peripheral remarks of German idealism. The essence of their philosophy is in their works. The above remarks are nothing but the skeleton of the substance of their ideas. But even the skeleton of German idealism is better than the "substance" of so many different schools of thought, who emphasize this or that without noticing the poverty and limitations of sticking to a single, primitive, undeveloped Notion.
The student who has not passed time in intimate allegiance with like-minded youth in a shared striving for conviction and clarity in important matters has not enjoyed academic life. It is becoming of noble-minded youths to concern themselves with sunshine and even mindless merriment, to which they are to a certain degree still entitled, but they are to search the darker shadows of more serious matters as well, and it is essential that such gravity does not assault the manner or the subject matter they pursue. That teacher is no friend of youth who attempts to fill them with grief and sorrow for the ways of the world or the course of politics when they must first acquire the strength of guiding convictions and beliefs. ... If the German academic life maintains a lasting worth in the memory of many, if the faces of the oldest men still brighten with the recollection of the university and the life there, then this is certainly not due to the memory of sensual pleasures, but is chiefly due to a recollection tied to that consciousness of a shared, courageous struggle for intellectual development and higher knowledge.
Schelling, Grounding of Positive Philosophy, 25
