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Escapism: a topic I've been thinking a lot of lately. The temptation to escape reality is almost inescapable. It takes a thousand and one forms. Most people can detect and name their most common way of escaping reality. But for some, it is almost unconscious. Perhaps a lot of our TV and Internet activity (emails, Facebook) - and even reading, whether book reading or magazine browsing - comes down to this.
Below is a very long quote from Josef Pieper, a German Christian philosopher, who passed away a few years ago. He wrote a lot about virtues. This passage includes a lot of longish and difficult sentences, but it really merits careful reading. In fact, I've printed it out and laminated two copies as bookmarks, one of which I gave away. That way I can meditate on it more thoroughly. I strongly recommend thinking about it.
There is a lot of hidden wisdom here. And surprising insights. What parts speak to you specifically? I at least found a few sentences that were incredibly meaningful.
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[The original meaning of sight and its distortion]
There is a lust for seeing that perverts the original meaning of sight and casts a person into disorder. The meaning of sight is the perception of reality. However, the “lust of the eye” does not seek to perceive reality but rather just to see. Augustine notes that the “lust of the palate” does not attain satisfaction but only results in eating and drinking: the same holds true for curiositas (curiosity) and the “lust of the eyes”. In his book Sein und Zeit (Being and time), Martin Heidegger says, “The concern of this kind of sight is not about grasping the truth and knowingly living within it but is about chances for abandoning oneself to the world.”
[The root of the distortion]
The degradation into curiositas of the natural desire to see can thus be substantially more than a harmless confusion on the surface. It can be the sign of one's fatal uprooting. It can signify that a person has lost the capacity to dwell in his own self; that he, fleeing from himself, disgusted and bored with the waste of an interior that is burnt out by despair, seeks in a thousand futile ways with selfish anxiety that which is accessible only to the high-minded calm of a heart disposed to self-sacrifice and thus in mastery over itself: the fullness of being. Since such a person does not truly live out of the wellspring of his being, he accordingly seeks, as again Heidegger says, in the “curiosity to which nothing is closed off”, “the security of a would-be genuine ‘living life’”.
[The effects of the distortion]
The “lust of the eyes” reaches its utmost destructive and extirpative power at the point where it was constructed for itself a world in its own image and likeness, where it has surrounded itself with the restlessness of a ceaseless film of meaningless objects for show and with a literally deafening noise of nothing more than impressions and sensations that roar in an uninterrupted chase around every window of the senses. Behind this papery facade of ostentation lies absolute nothingness, a “world” of at most one-day constructs that often become insipid after just one-quarter of an hour and are thrown out like a newspaper that has been read or a magazine that has been paged through; a world which, before the revealing gaze of a sound spirit uninfected by its contagion, shows itself to be like a metropolitan entertainment district in the harsh clarity of a winter morning: barren, bleak, and ghostly to the point of pushing one to despair.
[The heart of the problem; a "summary", if you will]
Still, the destructive element of this disorder, born out of and shaped by illness, is found in the fact that this disorder obstructs the original power of man to perceive reality, that it renders a person unable not only to attain his own self but also to attain reality and truth.
[The cure]
If, therefore, a fraudulent world of this kind threatens to overrun and conceal the world of reality, then the cultivation of the natural desire to see assumes the character of a measure of self-preservation and self-defense. And then studiositas (diligence) means especially this: that a person resists the nearly inescapable tempation to indiscipline with all the power of selfless self-protection, that he radically closes off the inner space of his life against the pressingly unruly pseudo-reality of empty sounds and sights---in order that, through and only through this ascetism of perception, he might safeguard or recoup that which truly constitutes man's living existence: to perceive the reality of God and of creation and to shape himself and the world by the truth that discloses itself only in silence.
--Josef Pieper, A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, pp. 39-40
7 months ago
11 comments:
Oh wow... that's a long quote. Perhaps you could give a short summary so we (or at least I) can actually understand / have an interest in trying to process the text.
I made it into the first paragraph and got distracted when I began thinking, "Why is Pieper quoting Heidegger?"
But I guess that's irrelevant. What I mean to say is: summary, please. :)
I tried to give an introduction to it to motivate people to read it, but I guess it was rather unsuccessful. A part of me, a large part, is reluctant to give a summary or simplification of the passage.
The reason for this is that a "demand" for a simplification is, in some cases, a symptom of precisely the "spiritual sickness" Pieper is trying to diagnose here and offer a cure for. (I am here intentionally twisting your words to make a point.)
But I do understand that the sentences are long (after all, he is German) and the language is old.
I will try to add subheadings to help out with the structure of the argument. (Again, it is not an "argument" in the philosophical sense of the word. It is a description of our human condition that is meant to be reflected on.)
Let me know if the headings help?
Also, I found a CSL quote that echoes a certain aspect of what Pieper is saying. I added it to "Think About It".
Sorry, Jason, but I don't think I have the patience to read your comment. Could you give me a summary of it?
Until then, I'll just go read some Perez and check my friends' Facebook status updates.
hehehehe...
I understand. While you're at it, would you mind summarizing Perez's contribution to humanity over, say, the last year or so?
The summary, I suspect, would amount to something like this: __________.
Why blank? Well, to quote from Pieper's fabulous quotation:
"Behind this papery facade of ostentation lies absolute NOTHINGNESS... a “world” of at most one-day constructs that often become insipid after just one-quarter of an hour and are thrown out like a newspaper that has been read or a magazine that has been paged through."
And: "A world which, before the revealing gaze of a sound spirit uninfected by its contagion, shows itself to be like a metropolitan entertainment district in the harsh clarity of a winter morning: barren, bleak, and ghostly to the point of pushing one to despair."
Cheerful, eh? Sad, but true.
All this serious thinking seems to be turning you into a pretty gloomy person. Seems like you need more superficial fluff in your life. :)
I wish that was the case! The truth is, there is so much superficial fluff in my life that I'm becoming a rather gloomy person. ;-)
If only I could dive into reality (joy) more fully!
fluff?...fluff?...like, fluff-friends?...good idea, lets all do it!
hehehhehe....
and you doubt that i have anything intelligent to say, häh!
I would NEVER doubt that. I would never risk public ridicule like that, as a simple search of your online commenting would put me to shame...
I'm adding the CSL quote here because I'm changing the "Think About It" quote.
“I think those are very wrong who say that school children should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a child reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired the incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.”
- C. S. Lewis
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