SOPHIA | Gelassenheit, the Planet & Heidegger
Murielle Mobengo • oct. 09, 2020
POLISHER OF LENSES (PHILOSOPHY)
Updated Oct. 10, 2021
Man, a thinking, that is, meditating being
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"We can only lose, or as the phrase goes, get loose from that which we knowingly or unknowingly possess."
Martin Heidegger, Discourse on thinking, Memorial address
Conradin Kreutzer's 100th anniversary (1955)
Detachment Gelassenheit
Archaic: a state of the weather that is not disturbed by any
atmospheric disturbance.
By extension, denotes inner peace or the ability to keep self-control in difficult situations. Serene, not agitated; neither excited, nor stressed out.
- Synonym: equanimity
- In German: Gelassenheit, which also means phlegm, inner peace ("innere Ruhe")
- Semantic proximity in English: stillness, poise
- Phonetic proximity in French: détachement, délaissement
In Heidegger's philosophy: getting to know oneself through intimacy with and detachment from oneself and the things in the world. Staying attentive and calm
Heidegger once reflected on how our unpoetic times, what the Indian forefathers of Poetry termed in Sanskrit "Kali Yuga," the age of confusion, the absence of Truth: darkness.
Poets often speak a secret, or rather layered language. Decoding their symbols takes time and stamina since poetry contains refined thought and emotion. Once we crack the poetic code though, an inner clarity and a will to explore ourselves reveals itself.
A poem is a magnifying glass and Heidegger was a gifted mirror-maker. His hybrid writing, enchanting and reasoned, appears complicated. Heidegger had no choice but to create a new language to share his visions of our existential horizon in the West. An observer of the Self he called Dasein, "the being-there" or "the there," he truly was one of us, a Poet.
The Western man faces a moral and spiritual crisis, now that he grew tired of exploring the outer and its limitless relativity. (S)he forgot human psyche needs the absolute to rest. The absolute is genuine and unquestionable: life, sacredness, beauty, Harmony. Because the absolute contains everything relative, thus entails our motivations, that list is infinite. So being intimate with our heart is essential to stay in touch with causality. Germans have a short, yet lofty word for such a state: Innigkeit.
What's intrinsic, within, and unique to a sentient being is "innig". Heidegger assumed we would lose the will to Innigkeit and prefer strategy instead, and wrote about the dangers of existential gloom we combat with things (and Instagram), up to no avail. A reason why Europe and America have been drawn to Hinduism, Zen, psychedelic drugs and all kinds of shamanism since the 60s. When life is matter and consumerism only, angst becomes a life style.
The Philosopher and the Cobra
The West is now seeking contact with an inner god who is neither in poetical and disciplined rituals, nor at the temple or in the church but in business. We sell Yoga, mantras or meditation classes and will keep on reifying the Divine because we are in pain, like half of our soul is missing.
The
third issue of {R}évolution
will be released mid January 2021 but the exploration of our grand algorithmic dream is ongoing. Our issues are a perfect reflection of relativity: endless. The mythology of robots, the internet, trans- and so called posthumanism, and a phenomenology of social media will help us dive deep into Heidegger's vision on computation
and how its predominance changed our lives.
In the meantime, let me tell you a story, Gelassenheit, a philosophical tale, a fragmented meditation channeled seventy years ago to revive our culture, reveal clarity, introduce quietness. We need many things now, but without calm and lucidity, we cannot develop anything or ourselves. We must be still to witness our thoughts and make sure they match our experience of reality.
Normally, Philosophy helps with that but academic philosophy is now a bad joke, a useless regurgitation of the past. Why? Because Life itself is philosophical, always happens now, and no one can live our lives on our behalf.
Still, I love the game of philosophy. I enjoy long thoughts, long reads, long sentences, adverbs, concepts formed with Greek and Latin, and fifty syllables long words to inquire consciousness, and the nature of the real. But lately, a thought of unusual brevity happened to me: For us humans, reality happens on Earth. Gaia is real; she is not faking it until she makes it. I don't know about robots in garages or the Silicon Valley. I may have a clue about subtil beings roaming within and without us, but I suspect we cannot keep up with the investigation without Gaia. Psychedelic drugs grow here, for God's sake.
I also realized living on planet Earth is not safe. Although our species learned a lot about her, She remains unpredictable. So, acknowledging it's not safe to live will help us find out what on Earth we're doing here, and fear Gaia. Fear is always a good start when you're not safe. Keeps you alert. Alive. Try feel safe in front of a cobra.
Facing a cobra gives you a limited set of choices: surrender to the danger, freeze, fight, get hurt and die. Or surrender to the reality of the cobra. Let it sharpen your senses, let the adrenaline do its job, shelter you. Once sheltered, the repetition of fear–Earth is home to many cobras– will cause you to think repeatedly about it. Trauma starts here, and meditation. And reverence for your cobra-like Mother, a sublime, terrible giver and remover of breath.
In the meantime, viruses may reappear, cancers mutate, and mass extinctions occur, perhaps because sapiens learns through pain and repetition and Gaia knows.
Not so long ago, and elsewhere, the Poet Heidegger wrote:
“The night is the time to rescue the past divine and hide the coming gods. The night in such rescuing and hiding nights is not nought, so it also contains its own broad clarity, and the stillness of the silent preparation for the ones to come.”
Enlightening only if you keep thinking about it.
What's the point?
Now after you've read
{R}2 and meditated on Heidegger's quote, if someone comes to you and asks:
"So what's the point of all this?
What's the purpose of Poetry?
Is Art supposed to be Beauty?
How do you recognize a Fact from a Prophecy?
Why Philosophy?
Is any of this useful?"
From a place of Gelassenheit, that is, serenity, you will answer:
Poetry is magnified introversion. Art is poetry made visible. A Prophecy gathers both. Philosophy polishes them while revealing every trick, every ending. They are all intertwined as they all happen on Gaia. Without Her, there is no poetry, no art, no prophecy, no philosophy, no Science, no Beauty.
Gaia once filled our imagination, our mythologies. Before greed took over, we used to worship her as the mysterious mother-Goddess birthing flowers and monsters and genius and mysticism.
Now She is a set of data to exploit and analyze, a giant trolley suspended in the sky, or one planet among the many planets in the universe humans dream to colonize.
Planning an escape from Gaia may be exciting, but is it feasible for you? It might be feasible for some, but is it for you now? What about in 5 years? 10 maybe? How about 20 years? Can you make it in 30 or 50 or are you just faking it?
Remember when you were a child and your room was in a mess with all your toys and your mother would ground you until you clean it up. Afterwards, you felt comfortable and safe, ready to mess it up again, like your children probably do now. What if Gaia were the mother who grounds us in our own mess until our inner room is found again?
What if the Earth were the only place in this vast universe where we can inhabit the "circumference of the fur" while reproductive fervor and cobra-like dangers threaten us and we start seeking what is long-lasting beyond desire and safety (duality)? Do you understand why, as Poet
Roarshock
says, "it will never be linear?" and pain and pleasure and pain have no choice but to come back?
Samskar,
the eternal return,
die ewige Wiederkunft,
L'éternel retour.
One day, near or far, after many, many returns–Nietzschean for some, Karmic for others–in this land of pleasure and pain and relief and pleasure and pain and death, we will be telling stories by the fireside or within the radiance of our stillness.
In a regained intimacy with the Self and Gaia, our prodigious mother, we will recall how there were no things, no objects, no conflicts of any kind because we were Gaia and the pain we inflicted only to ourselves. In a moment of obscure, almost absolute madness.
Until then, let's conjure Gelassenheit in our hearts and minds, our causes and their predicable effects.
Think about Heidegger's sutra again. Who said the night has to be so dark we are unable to distinguish dawn from dusk?
If you love Heidegger, German, opera, and want to practice your reading, feeling, and comprehension skills,
List of Services
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Discourse on thinking (Gelassenheit)List Item 1
A rather short read you will be forced to read slowly anyway because it describes how we think in our time.
-
Andenken
If you are a Poet and you have been asked many times what Poetry is, and you read a poem, sung a song or chanted a Mantra wholeheartedly and, still the person didn't get it, give him/her a translation of Andeken or the actual text in German.
This will strike a chord in him, he'll feel the beauty of being a Poet and will come back so you can teach him how to be like Hölderlin and Heidegger reunited. Or he will not come back. In either case, Serenity.
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A footage of Martin Heidegger
This 15-minute explanation is simple, visionary and may cause you to close your Twitter account and reflect on your being-in-the-world and the Poet dormant in you.
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Conradin Kreutzer
Conradin Kreutzer (1780) is a piano virtuoso, music critic and inventor of the pan melodicon (an instrument close to the harmonica). He was born near Messkirch, Heidegger's hometown, in The Black Forest (Germany).
Kreutzer was prolific, both in music and in epistolary literature, since he maintained a lively correspondence with artists, poets, and crowned heads of his time, including King Frederick I, for example.
Although he became famous in America for his male choirs, the warm, delicate and a bit keyed up interpretation {R} chooses to share with you is feminine.
Shelly Ezra plays clarinet; Makiko Asahi, fortepiano, and Baiba Urka is the wren chanelling emotion.
A beauty.
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