Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta Humanidad. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta Humanidad. Mostrar todas las entradas

martes, 7 de octubre de 2025

A Role to Play

 

domingo, 21 de julio de 2024

Mejor sin nadie

Las cartas de Pierre Teilhard de Chardin a su prima Marguerite Teillar-Chambon durante los años de la Primera Guerra Mundial fueron editadas por ésta con el título P.Teilhard de Chardin: Génesis de un Pensamiento. En las cartas relata episodios de su vida como camillero y sacerdote en el ejército francés, y sobre todo medita sobre sus intuiciones teológicas y su relación con Dios, que encuentra a la vez consoladora y problemática, pues lejos aún de los misticismos evolucionistas del punto Omega, porfía Teilhard en la eterna trampa de intentar ver la historia y la humanidad como guiada y observada (nunca "caprichosamente atormentada") por un Dios personal, esa imposible mezcla de trascendencia cósmica y de "amigo imaginario" que lleva a las mentes a laberintos de espejos, incertidumbres intransitables y despeñaderos abisales—

Hold them cheap

May who ne'er hung there. 

Esfuerzos vanos o contradictorios cuando Teilhard intenta extraer una teodicea de las atrocidades y brutalidad estúpida de la guerra, viéndola como el lugar donde está la acción creativa del mundo, como un conflicto del mundo consigo mismo que lleva a un avance espiritual, a una mayor integración y una espiritualidad superior, etc. etc.... 

 En fin, entre las perplejidades a que se aboca Teilhard intentando justificar ante su prima el sentido divino de la labor de ambos, y buscando más luz en su relación con el Gran Amigo, hay un pasaje revelador—revelador de la otra cara del heroico camillero y del dedicado y piadosísimo sacerdote. Una cara de su personalidad podríamos decir muy poco cristiana, e incluso muy poco humana, aunque quiénes somos para decir lo que es poco humano o demasiado humano. En fin, que es una fea idea o una fea actitud o tendencia (fea a la vez que "muy devota y muy mística") que Teilhard confiesa a su prima en confianza aunque no exactamente como un pecado (y eso que no es algo como para irlo diciendo, aunque al parecer sí es publicable). 

Digo que no me parece muy cristiano, o muy "católico" al menos —pero ya avisaba Nietzsche contra una tendencia malsana en el cristianismo, el rechazo al mundo, el tanatismo o desprecio de lo existente en aras de un mundo mejor. Tendencia virtuosa o desprendida, que si se sale de madre puede inducir a actitudes francamente desagradables o indeseables.

Es un pasaje el que digo donde se juntan en Teilhard de modo inextricable el amor místico a Dios y un cierto satanismo presuntuoso y mefistofélico. Unas tentaciones solipsistas que ni Max Stirner las querría. Por no decir una prepotencia cósmica, un egoísmo galáctico, un elitismo de vértigo, un tanatismo ascético y una misantropía larvada que al parecer el buen sacerdote hacía mucho por no manifestar de maneras ofensivas en su día a día. 

En fin, ésta es la idea— que no digo yo que vaya a causar escándalo hoy. De hecho podría augurar un nuevo brote de teilhardismo entre los actuales animalistas, extincionistas y antinatalistas:

Por mi postal de anteayer, habrás sabido que he recibido tu carta del 10 de agosto [de 1917]. ¿No es curioso que ambos tengamos la misma debilidad, por la vida de contemplación egoísta, sin nada que la perturbe y donde ningún tercero (a menos que sea elegido para ello) se interponga inoportunamente entre los dos esenciales, el alma y Dios? Tienes razón, hay que reaccionar. Además, naturalmente hablando, el "otro" (es decir, todo el mundo, salvo una decena de humanos admitidos en nuestra órbita) es un intruso que nos importuna. Al menos, yo lo siento así, en algunos momentos. Intuitivamente, yo preferiría una tierra llena de bestias, a una tierra llena de hombres. Cada hombre tiene un pequeño mundo aparte, y este pluralismo me es esencialmente desagradable. Es preciso recordar que estamos en devenir, y que toda esta multiplicidad, por la caridad que Nuestro Señor nos exige, contrariamente a nuestros gustos, acabará por no ser más que uno... Es, sin duda, un aumento de esta Unidad, pagado con nuestro esfuerzo por salir de nosotros, lo que se traiciona por este aumento de nuestra vida interior, que sigue a la exteriorización caritativa de nosotros mismos, de que tú hablas. En estos momentos, como en los de sufrimiento providencial, se siente de una manera extraña que nuestra verdadera fuerza no está en nosotros, sino que nos viene de otra parte, cuando plegamos nuestra libertad a unas condiciones de existencia que no tienen nada de común con nuestras pequeñas combinaciones personales.

Quizá haya que ver en todo esto en parte un síndrome de la mili, con Teilhard a la vez fastidiado por la despersonalización del ejército o por el exceso de intimidad a que obliga, y fustigándose a sí mismo a sobrellevar lo que vaya viniendo, por la disciplina debida y por abnegación cristiana. En todo caso arrojan estas reflexiones una luz curiosa sobre la personalidad que llevó a Teilhard a su curioso apocalipsis divino o Big Crunch teológico en el que toda diferencia y contradicción se subsumen en un Dios autocontemplado que —por fin— está solo y absorto consigo mismo, una vez depurada su Noosfera, y superadas (aufgehoben) sus creaciones y meditaciones.

 


 

Nacimiento de la Noosfera


 —oOo—

sábado, 24 de diciembre de 2022

Discurso del diablo en 'Man and Superman'


En el Acto III de Man and Superman, de  George Bernard Shaw, los personajes discuten sobre el sentido de la acción, y del matrimonio y de la reproducción y de la vida y de la existencia, concluyendo con una defensa de la Fuerza Vital en boca de Don Juan, una fuerza que guía la evolución y que llevará al hombre hacia su destino en el Superhombre (en la obra se alude explícitamente a Nietzsche). El Diablo, otro de los interlocutores, es mas escéptico: el Universo visto globalmente no tiene propósito, y el hombre, con todo su cerebro y su inteligencia, no es sino una especie destructiva:




 
DON JUAN. You forget that brainless magnificence of body has been tried. Things immeasurably greater than man in every respect but brain have existed and perished. The megatherium, the icthyosaurus have paced the earth with seven-league steps and hidden the day with cloud vast wings. Where are they now? Fossils in museums, and so few and imperfect at that, that a knuckle bone or a tooth of one of them is prized beyond the lives of a thousand soldiers. These things lived and wanted to live; but for lack of brains they did not know how to carry out their purpose, and so destroyed themselves.THE DEVIL. And is Man any the less destroying himself for all this boasted brain of his? Have you walked up and down upon the earth lately? I have; and I have examined Man's wonderful inventions. And I tell you that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. The peasant I tempt to-day eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons. This marvellous force of Life of which you boast is a force of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness. What is his religion? An excuse for hating ME. What is his law? An excuse for hanging YOU. What is his morality? Gentility! an excuse for consuming without producing. What is his art? An excuse for gloating over pictures of slaughter. What are his politics? Either the worship of a despot because a despot can kill, or parliamentary cockfighting. I spent an evening lately in a certain celebrated legislature, and heard the pot lecturing the kettle for its blackness, and ministers answering questions. When I left I chalked up on the door the old nursery saying—"Ask no questions and you will be told no lies." I bought a sixpenny family magazine, and found it full of pictures of young men shooting and stabbing one another. I saw a man die: he was a London bricklayer's laborer with seven children. He left seventeen pounds club money; and his wife spent it all on his funeral and went into the workhouse with the children next day. She would not have spent sevenpence on her children's schooling: the law had to force her to let them be taught gratuitously; but on death she spent all she had. Their imagination glows, their energies rise up at the idea of death, these people: they love it; and the more horrible it is the more they enjoy it. Hell is a place far above their comprehension: they derive their notion of it from two of the greatest fools that ever lived, an Italian and an Englishman. The Italian described it as a place of mud, frost, filth, fire, and venomous serpents: all torture. This ass, when he was not lying about me, was maundering about some woman whom he saw once in the street. The Englishman described me as being expelled from Heaven by cannons and gunpowder; and to this day every Briton believes that the whole of his silly story is in the Bible. What else he says I do not know; for it is all in a long poem which neither I nor anyone else ever succeeded in wading through. It is the same in everything. The highest form of literature is the tragedy, a play in which everybody is murdered at the end. In the old chronicles you read of earthquakes and pestilences, and are told that these showed the power and majesty of God and the littleness of Man. Nowadays the chronicles describe battles. In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others chase the fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly. And this, the chronicle concludes, shows the greatness and majesty of empires, and the littleness of the vanquished. Over such battles the people run about the streets yelling with delight, and egg their Governments on to spend hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter, whilst the strongest Ministers dare not spend an extra penny in the pound against the poverty and pestilence through which they themselves daily walk. I could give you a thousand instances; but they all come to the same thing: the power that governs the earth is not the power of Life but of Death; and the inner need that has nerved Life to the effort of organizing itself into the human being is not the need for higher life but for a more efficient engine of destruction. The plague, the famine, the earthquake, the tempest were too spasmodic in their action; the tiger and crocodile were too easily satiated and not cruel enough: something more constantly, more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows, and the electrocutor; of the sword and gun; above all, of justice, duty, patriotism and all the other isms by which even those who are clever enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most destructive of all the destroyers.



Más adelante este diálogo, expone o reconoce Don Juan la tesis de que la evolución humana está guiada por la guerra y la lucha por el poder. Es una interesante y temprana exposición de la tesis evolutiva de que somos hijos de la guerra:


THE DEVIL. Yes; and this civilization! what is it, after all? 
DON JUAN. After all, an excellent peg to hang your cynical commonplaces on; but BEFORE all, it is an attempt on Man's part to make himself something more than the mere instrument of Woman's purpose. So far, the result of Life's continual effort not only to maintain itself, but to achieve higher and higher organization and completer self-consciousness, is only, at best, a doubtful campaign between its forces and those of Death and Degeneration. The battles in this campaign are mere blunders, mostly won, like actual military battles, in spite of the commanders. 
THE STATUE. That is a dig at me. No matter: go on, go on. 
DON JUAN. It is a dig at a much higher power than you, Commander. Still, you must have noticed in your profession that even a stupid general can win battles when the enemy's general is a little stupider. 
THE STATUE. [very seriously] Most true, Juan, most true. Some donkeys have amazing luck. 
DON JUAN. Well, the Life Force is stupid; but it is not so stupid as the forces of Death and Degeneration. Besides, these are in its pay all the time. And so Life wins, after a fashion. What mere copiousness of fecundity can supply and mere greed preserve, we possess. The survival of whatever form of civilization can produce the best rifle and the best fed riflemen is assured.
 THE DEVIL. Exactly! the survival, not of the most effective means of Life but of the most effective means of Death. You always come back to my point, in spite of your wrigglings and evasions and sophistries, not to mention the intolerable length of your speeches.


El ideal de Don Juan, la evolución creadora de formas superiores, requiere sin embargo la inteligencia, sea cual sea su origen. La  cima de la  existencia humana, lo más parecido al superhombre que tenemos hoy, es

the philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, in invention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means. Of all other sorts of men I declare myself tired.


—sin embargo la obra termina con Don Juan (Tanner) casado con Doña Ana, impulsado se supone por la Fuerza Vital, y rindiéndose a las argucias matrimoniales femeninas: "The Life Force enchants me: I have the whole world in my arms when I clasp you".... 

Tanto más curiosa esta conclusión desde el punto de vista de Bernard Shaw, cuando se piensa que su propia esposa impuso en su matrimonio la condición de no tener relaciones sexuales. Debería de estar pensando en la vida y deseos de los otros.

 

 

 
—oOo—


 

Aparición del Rey Hamlet