tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post6194912742638749363..comments2024-01-05T01:21:21.702-08:00Comments on <center>SPECULUM CRITICUM TRADITIONIS</center>: Is happiness boring?skholiasthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-27596355205108390912011-03-08T07:38:34.188-08:002011-03-08T07:38:34.188-08:00Elisa,
Reading your comment I understand my own p...Elisa,<br /><br />Reading your comment I understand my own points better. There is a double tension. On the one hand, happy v. interested. On the other, eternity v. time. These are not the same, but get tangled in the reflections of we who, as you rightly indicate, cannot justly conceive of eternity at all. An endless succession is not the same as the "eternal now" at all. The denunciation of a so-called "eternity" conceived of as just (what Hegel called) "bad infinity" is just off-target. ("Yawn... what, to spend forever playing a harp and telling God how great he is? <i>Bo</i>-ring!") (Weirdly, the most concerted critic of Christianity, and still the only one who matters, is Nietzsche, who called for precisely a Sempiternal (and not at all an Eternal) Return. There's something deep in this.) But of course the problem is that all our images of eternity are temporal. The closest we get, I think, is in music, which as Jankelevitch says, communicates "something in general without saying anything in particular," and yet music is also often called the most temporal of the arts.<br /><br />Wittgenstein says somewhere in the <i>Tractatus</i> that the idea of the immortality of the soul will not do what is usually thought-- for no mystery is solved by imagining an endless existence instead of a finite one. The mystery is not why it must end but how it <i>is</i> at all.<br /><br />I am puzzled and a little alarmed by your comment vanishing. I checked to see if it had been unaccountably put into spam, but i don't find it anywhere. Sorry for that frustration for you.skholiasthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-87539236643810601592011-03-08T01:33:29.991-08:002011-03-08T01:33:29.991-08:00Dear Skholiast,
I just came back to this post to ...Dear Skholiast, <br />I just came back to this post to check whether you had answered to a comment I left here… and found out it disappeared. I hope I will be able to rephrase it now:<br />It seems that you oppose on the one hand happiness (understood as "contentment", in a non-dynamic way)/eternity and on the other tensions/curiositas/interesting life (which might be said to be "happy" insofar as it is meaningful, by the way, so that P. Trunk's thought seems more provocative than accurate).<br /> <br />Well, as shown by M.Yourcenar in "Tous les hommes sont mortels" and by J. Swift, eternity would be a condemn for us (who would not hate life if s/he had to live forever and hence to do the same things forever? But the point is that eternity is not interesting for us not because it is intrinsically boring, but rather because it is unconceivable. We imagine it as if it were protracted temporality and hence imagine we would get bored. How could we imagine something extra-temporal if our experience is intrinsically temporal and linked to its finitude?<br />(I am sorry if I have banalised your thoughts, I just want ot be sure I got it right)elisa freschihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17068583874519657894noreply@blogger.com