Rage versus saudade
Posted: Tue Oct 13, 2015 6:29 pm
Once upon a time, John Stuart Mill claimed:
In fact, when sin is present, there are four responses to it, on the level of the question of retribution: retribution itself, apologies, forgiveness, or redemption. Emotionally, vengeance and rage are married like the most pious and delirious lovers. However, as Peter Straub says, the emotion saudade is like a "premature nostalgia." Nostalgia, as an emotion related to the concept of innocence, therefore fits saudade to the concept, not of miraculously going backwards in time to a lost state of innocence, but to the creation of a new, symmetrical place, the state of redemption. Saudade, then, is the emotional signature for the concept of redemption. We would hence amend Mill's quote like so:
In our reasoning, we are often vindictive, not only in calling out each other for failures in reasoning, but also in condemning ourselves for trying to know by reason all that we wish we might. The collision of self-reasoning and self-rage is a very polluting influence on our judgments, enough to where maintaining the religious image of this pollution (Hell) must be terribly wrong, cascading down through the mind from axioms to explanations and so on and anon. There is something deeply corrupting in the idea of Hell as it has emerged and submerged itself in humanity's thoughts, over history. It defies saudade and love, evil in itself then it seems. But anger might be tempered, given a proper, if lowly place. Hell will be sent to itself, but then it will stop being Hell, it will negate itself. So saudade would overpower the will to retribution, ultimately, and some of the longing for that subjective paradise would be encoded into the echoes of eternal saudade etched into the longing we feel in looking, at times, to the light and the dark on the horizon.
Is this true? Punishment requires an external, punishing authority. One cannot coherently punish oneself (one can do things in the attempt, things that betray a fragmented mind or whatever; but the full act is impossible). So, if morality requires retribution, it requires a being external to oneself to enforce. (This follows even if the agent of retribution is "conscience," because we are falsely projecting conscience out of ourselves in order to make it punish us with guilt feelings.) But if morality is ultimately supposed to be about autonomy, it's not true that punishment is essential to its endurance, neither does retribution actually, clearly possess any value at all.We do not call anything wrong, unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be punished in some way or other for doing it[.]
In fact, when sin is present, there are four responses to it, on the level of the question of retribution: retribution itself, apologies, forgiveness, or redemption. Emotionally, vengeance and rage are married like the most pious and delirious lovers. However, as Peter Straub says, the emotion saudade is like a "premature nostalgia." Nostalgia, as an emotion related to the concept of innocence, therefore fits saudade to the concept, not of miraculously going backwards in time to a lost state of innocence, but to the creation of a new, symmetrical place, the state of redemption. Saudade, then, is the emotional signature for the concept of redemption. We would hence amend Mill's quote like so:
Saudade is married to love. It is love's true power that is the form of the answer to the form of the question that saudade is. (In Kantian terms, the intuition of the emotion saudade is both a form of, and a formal, intuition--to wit, in this case, the empty manifold of infinite-dimensional time, where time is parakinesthetically perceived not only in the language of past-present-and-future but also as the things we call "emotions". Every geometrical structure in this coordinate space graphs a different possible emotional state; the entire graph, apart from its marked-off points and lines and the like, itself presents to us an emotion, and this is saudade. But then love is the image of a function for filling the entire graph in, at once. It "looks the same" as the graph, in the end, i.e. it is a block of geometrical information, so that it transcendentally reflects saudade. But now why does love try to fill the graph in? Because it is a creative, i.e. a transcendentally constructive, force.) Love, then, is a better answer to sin that punishment, and it's not really quite right to speak of a love that punishes (hence the incredibly depraved irony of the words on the gate into Hell in Dante's Inferno).We do not call anything wrong, unless we mean to imply that a person ought to make amends oneself in some way or other for doing it.
In our reasoning, we are often vindictive, not only in calling out each other for failures in reasoning, but also in condemning ourselves for trying to know by reason all that we wish we might. The collision of self-reasoning and self-rage is a very polluting influence on our judgments, enough to where maintaining the religious image of this pollution (Hell) must be terribly wrong, cascading down through the mind from axioms to explanations and so on and anon. There is something deeply corrupting in the idea of Hell as it has emerged and submerged itself in humanity's thoughts, over history. It defies saudade and love, evil in itself then it seems. But anger might be tempered, given a proper, if lowly place. Hell will be sent to itself, but then it will stop being Hell, it will negate itself. So saudade would overpower the will to retribution, ultimately, and some of the longing for that subjective paradise would be encoded into the echoes of eternal saudade etched into the longing we feel in looking, at times, to the light and the dark on the horizon.