#burkitt

Elogio de la triste… (redivivo)

Elogio de la triste… (redivivo)

Attitudes are more important than abilities Motives are more important than methods Character is more important than cleverness, And the Heart takes precedence over the head.

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904) Weber argued that from the 16th century onward, beginning in Geneva and Scotland, but spreading their influence outwards, the Protestant sects such as Calvinism created an ascetic ethic by which individuals ordered themselves and their behaviour; activities that were to be influenced in the formation of capitalism. What was important in the Protestant ethic was its denial of any magical means of salvation by the church, such as the Catholic confession in which sins could be forgiven and the soul cleansed and saved. For example, Calvinism preached a harsh doctrine of predestination, which claimed that God had already predestined the few for salvation and there was nothing that an individual could do in their life to change that. For Weber, this had two effects on individuals. First, the lack of any means of salvation meant that individuals were alienated from both God and church, as they wre now abandoned in the world and left to an uncertain fate. Second, because individuals could no longer be forgiven sins, every sin counted against them and was perhaps a sign they weren't one of those chosen for salvation, into a progression of good works according to a rational plan. The ascertic life-plan of good deeds, hard work, frugal living and the accumulation of wealh, a wordly sign that the individual was one of the chosen. As Louis Dumont has said, there is a paradox in the doctrine of predestination: although it would seem to take away the individual's control of their fate, on the contrary, it makes them more concerned with their fate, as this becomes a possible sign of election.

[A]lthough the body is becoming more intensified in terms of its experience, this only occurs through it becoming an ‘object’ of the mind, viewed at a relative distance. This does not simply mean that the bodies of others become the objects for psychological observation, but that our own bodies are also experienced as such. The norms by which conduct is regulated in the relations between people are also those by which we regulate our own feelings and actions. We observe others and ourselves more closely. However, this intellectual observation began to present itself as existing in the form of a separate component of humans, like the heart or brain, so that the act of thinking crystallized into the idea of ‘intelligence’, ‘reason’ or ‘spirit’ which was somehow distinct from the rest of the body. The relation between mind and body, thought and emotion, became conceived in spatial terms. Moreover, the mind was seen as trapped inside the body because of the increased barriers of restraint between people and the doubt about the actual existence of things beyond their comprehension in reason. Humans felt that they were looking out on the world from inside a casing, or at worst, a prison. Elias refers to this through the metaphor of the ‘thinking statues’, each one of us standing in isolation and silent, inanimate contemplation of an ‘external’ world with which we feel we have lost direct contact. The metaphor conveys the new way in which humans experience thinking itself, as something solitary, still and silent. The bodily forms of knowing and thinking which would involve all the human senses – of communication and dialogue, action and movement, touch, sight, sound and smell – are curtailed to thinking at a distance and in an inanimate way. As I have said, it is visual perception and its links to a form of cognitive apprehension – which is to say, purely ‘mental’ as opposed to sensual – that take precedence. The outwardly projected persona then becomes like a shell or a wall that stands between us and all that is beyond our bodily limits.

St Augustine recognized the struggle between good and evil in the hearts of all humans, including his own, charting his path to God through this 'inner turmoil'. While the question 'who am I?' is not explicitly asked, Mauss understands Christian records of the struggle in a soul as another step towards modern notions of the self, because with the idea that each one of us has our own soul, even if it is ridden with conflict, we come closer to a metaphysical foundation for the self. This is because the soul is conceived as something inward and indivisible, almost like a substance in itself that characterizes our own individuality, wihch can be divided from the body - our physical and earthly mark of difference. It could be said that Augustinian Christian ideas and practices are an important development in the turn 'inwards' in the search for self.