Monday, August 25
Modernity: Pleasure without Joy
"Only a joyous people can sustain pointless activity, festivity and rest. Only a people who can sustain pointless activity, festivity and rest can be joyous. And only a joyous people can finally resist the culture of death, because only through the embrace of pointless activity and the repose in finite forms can we resist this culture's evacuation of substance and its identification of the Real with transcendental violence. In other words, joy, with its delight in the intrinsic, its commitment to the transcendent, and its repose in the transcendent through its embrace of finite form, is absolutely essential to the good order and to the genuine letting be of any properly human activity, and indeed proper human being. It is difficult to image that a culture that does not how to feast or how to pray, which makes no distinction between the hours of the day or the days of the week, and has forgotten how to mark the passage of time with seasons of celebration and solemnity, will be capable of great art, music or craftsmanship, or that it will be able to sustain marriage, rear children, or fulfil the natural obligation between generations in caring for the sick and dying."
~Michael Hanby, "The Culture of Death, the Ontology of Boredom, and the Resistance of Joy." More here.
~Michael Hanby, "The Culture of Death, the Ontology of Boredom, and the Resistance of Joy." More here.
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