The philosopher’s experience of the eternal, which to Plato was arrhēton (“unspeakable”), and to Aristotle aneu logou (“without word”), and which later was conceptualized in the paradoxical nunc stans (“the standing now”), can occur only outside the realm of human affairs and outside the plurality of men, as we know from the Cave parable in Plato’s Republic, where the philosopher, having liberated himself from the fetters that bound him to his fellow men, leaves the cave in perfect “singularity,” as it were, neither accompanied nor followed by others. Politically speaking, if to die is the same as “to cease to be among men,” experience of the eternal is a kind of death, and the only thing that separates it from real death is that it is not final because no living creature can endure it for any length of time. And this is precisely what separates the vita contemplativa from the vita activa in medieval thought. Yet it is decisive that the experience of the eternal, in contradistinction to that of the immortal, has no correspondence with and cannot be transformed into any activity whatsoever, since even the activity of thought, which goes on within one’s self by means of words, is obviously not only inadequate to render it but would interrupt and ruin the experience itself. - Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (cc. Artem Kozachenko Kevin Cason Maarten Winkel this line of reasoning would probably resonate with some Buddhist strands of thought, not surprised to find affinities among the great traditions)
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 16:03:18 +0000
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