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Uma das faces do absurdo ao repentinamente enxergar o mundo.

 

(...) perceiving that the world is “dense”, sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with wich we have clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again. The stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us. Just as there are days when under the familiar face of a woman, we see as a stranger her we had loved months or years ago, perhaps we shall come even to desire what suddenly leaves us so alone. But the time has not yet come. Just one thing: that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd. – The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus, p.14.

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Sobre a ideia de divertimento e prazer na atualidade

In our societies, we experience fabricated leisure – a kind of planned ‘free time’ that is sandwiched between typically unpleasant work times. And we are bombarded with advertisements that promise we will have a great time if only we get the latest phone or the latest computer game. Ours is a culture that, under the guise of consumption, actually counsels the renunciation of enjoyment. In such a society, wants come apart from pleasures. If you get an expensive car because that’s what you think your status requires you to have, that is not the same as enjoying it. The individual who succumbs to this idea does not relish owning the car. She just thinks she must have and display it. We inhabit a world that devalues pleasure while apparently serving it up in large doses. Rather than enjoyment playing a central role in people striving to become otherwise than they are, our culture works a strange ascetic turn. I am what I desire. I am what I consume. We are absorbed in an existence as desiring and consuming subjects, living as though we really are just those selves and no more.

In late capitalism, the subjective character of enjoyment is appropriated into circuits of consumption. Philosophers have long remarked the self-subjugating effects of peoples’ absorption in the standard practices of their day, those taken to be ‘what everyone does’. In Being and Time (1927), Martin Heidegger pointed out that ‘We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure.’ If you like an activity because you have unthinkingly assumed an approving view of it from others, does this still count as an authentic pleasure? An experience that really feels good, feels good for you, as someone choosing freely. But what feels purely subjective to us might actually be deeply influenced by the contingent forms of feeling of our time – what our society and families and workplaces tell us that we can legitimately feel. We have a job on our hands to recognise how our ways of feeling and being are historically and culturally shaped. — Enjoy!, Sandy Grant

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Jesus, Paulo e o advento do cristianismo.

Jesus was an event within Judaism; it was not especially scandalous that a young Jewish radical went about proclaiming himself the Messiah, ambiguously calling himself “the son of Man,” and quarrelling with the rabbis about aspects of the law. But it was another thing entirely to claim—as Paul did—that Jesus came to earth to wash away an original sin contracted by humans in Eden; that this Jesus was crucified by the Romans, was buried, and rose from the dead; and that he would soon come again, in a rescue mission that would usher in a new eternal kingdom. In place of the intimate, familial struggle of the Jews and their God, Paul invokes a strict theology of sin and salvation. Kierkegaard, at his most Protestant-masochistic, says that Christianity’s singularity lies in its understanding of sin; if that’s true, it was Paul’s singularity rather than Jesus’. The new theology transfers Judaism’s healthy involvement in this life onto a palpitating anticipation of the next; the present becomes eternity’s duller portal. – The Radical Origins of Christianity, James Wood.

 

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Niestzsche, em observação de 1881, sobre viagem ao sul da Itália, em 1876.

“‘Como posso ter suportado viver até agora!’, enquanto o veículo rodava por Posillipo – luz do entardecer.

Não tenho força suficiente para o norte: lá reinam almas grosseiras e artificias que trabalham tão assídua e necessariamente quanto o castor em sua construção. E pensar que foi entre elas que passei toda a minha juventude! Eis o que me impressionou quando pela primeira vez vi chegar o entardecer com seu vermelho e seu cinza aveludados no céu de Nápoles [você poderia te morrido sem ter visto isso] – como um arrepio, como por pena de mim mesmo pelo fato de haver começado minha vida sendo velho, e me vieram lágrimas e o sentimento de ter sido salvo, ainda que no último instante.

Eu tenho disposição suficiente para o sul.”

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Sobre Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein was hostile to modern philosophy as he found it. He thought it the product of a culture that had come to model everything that matters about our lives on scientific explanation. In its ever-extending observance of the idea that knowledge, not wisdom, is our goal, that what matters is information rather than insight, and that we best address the problems that beset us, not with changes in our heart and spirit but with more data and better theories, our culture is pretty much exactly as Wittgenstein feared it would become. He sought to uncover the deep undercurrents of thought that had produced this attitude. He feared it would lead not to a better world but the demise of our civilization. That perhaps explains his deep unpopularity today. It is for the same reason that Ludwig Wittgenstein is the most important philosopher of modern times. — The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ian Ground

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Um dos motivos para escrever, sobretudo ficção, e uma das dimensões políticas da escrita. 

"But most of the writers I talk to desire not to escape the world but to enlarge it, by extending the possibilities of language. I think Amy Tan put it best: “The feeling I’m talking about stems from the sense that we can never fully share the truth of who we are,” she told me. “When I was six or seven, I used to read a thesaurus searching for the words that meant exactly what I felt. And I could never find them … When I had a feeling like sadness, I couldn’t find a word that meant everything that I felt inside of me. I always felt that words were inadequate, that I’d never been able to express myself—ever. Even now, it’s so hard to express what I think and feel, the totality of what I’ve seen. But this loneliness is the impetus for writing.”

In other words: articulating these universal experiences is a way of combatting existential loneliness, for both the writer and the reader. Anyone who’s truly loved a book knows how it can shrink the numbing distance between us. But it’s more than that. The attempt to speak where there’d been silence, or name a thing that had no name, is inherently political—is revolutionary—because, in very real ways, it expands boundaries: first of what can be said, and then of what can be done, and finally of what is possible." — Why Write Fiction in 2017?, Joe Fassler