On the eternal recurrence as the ground of holiness in the light of philip gröning’s the great silence

Abstract

What is the most important part of sky in human existence? Doubtlessly, showing the passage of time. From morning to night and from one day to another, man contemplates how existence fl ows and how any unsettlement or joy dissolves into the fathomless vault in accordance with a rhythm or sense that despite its transparency always arouses our bewilderment but also our admiration, due precisely to the ceaseless fl owing that prevents everyone from getting a fi nal understandingof how the world unfolds, above all when the socio-historical background makes everyone believe that he can hold a sway over whatever kind of reality, which is what has happened more often than not during the last two centuries, when the modern ideal of a rational articulation of experience has been vulgarized and changed into the idea of an immediate exploitation of time and of the own being, which has however nothing to do with the very philosophical aims of modern thought or with that traditional vision of existence that nurtures the several forms of voluntary seclusion that have been conceived as a way of self-perfection. Of these forms, none has perhaps been more criticized than the Western monkhood, which has been denounced as an ascetic renunciation to the world and as the search of a pseudo- spirituality that belies the elemental social and bodily framework of existence, when the fact is that it could on the contrary be seen as a way to dispense with that absurd want of exploitation that characterizes the vulgar or rather worldly approach to tradition and to modernity, which is what Grôning shows in the documentary mentioned in the title of the present dissertation, whose artistic structure sets aside the normal filmic narrative and focuses instead on how silence and quietudestructure the vital forces that allow man to experience a sui generis sense of transcendence within immanency, which is what in accordance with my standpoint meansthe idea of the eternal recurrence that Nietzsche tried so eagerly to explain and whose utmost symbol is precisely the sky. Thus, we want to meditate upon the cyclic nature of existence and upon the links that monkhood and, by and large, asceticism could have with that fuller experience thereof called holiness, independently, of course, of the Nietzschean ideas concerning the matter (or rather against them). In order to develop this, we shall divide the dissertation as follows: in thefirst section, we shall show how the unity of being appears as the ground of our humanity; in the second section, we shall see how time regulates a conception of existence that frees man from the anguish inherent to a “productive” determination of our finitude; in the third section, we shall oppose monkhoodand asceticism to a vulgar vision of isolation and discipline; in the fourth and fi nal section, we shall make understandable how the aesthetic fabric of cinema goes hand-in-hand with a perception of all this.