Silence & Contemplation On Silence and Existential Distrust On the "Hypertrophy of Visual Curiosity"
There is a gratification in seeing that reverses the original meaning of vision and works disorder in man himself. The true meaning of seeing is perception of reality. But “concupiscence of the eyes” does not aim to perceive reality, but to enjoy “seeing”. This degeneration of the natural wish to see may be much more than a harmless confusion on the surface of the human being. It may be the sign of complete rootlessness. It may mean that man has lost his capacity for living with himself; that, in flight from himself, nauseated and bored by the void of an interior life gutted by despair, he is seeking with selfish anxiety and on a thousand futile paths that which is given only to the noble stillness of a heart held ready for sacrifice and thus in possession of itself, namely, the fullness of being. Because he is not really living from the wellspring of his nature, he seeks, as Heidegger says, in “curiosity, to which nothing remains closed”, the pledge of a supposedly genuine “living Life”.
Not for nothing does Holy Scripture name “concupiscence of the eyes” among the three powers which constitute the world that “lies in the power of evil” (1 Jn 2.16; 5.19)
It reaches the extremes of its destructive and eradicating power when it builds itself a world according to its own image and likeness: when it surrounds itself with the restlessness of a perpetual moving picture of meaningless shows, and with the literally deafening noise of impressions and sensations breathlessly rushing past the windows of the senses. Behind the flimsy pomp of its façade dwells absolute nothingness; it is a world of, at most, ephemeral creations, which often within less than a quarter hour become stale and discarded, like a newspaper or magazine swiftly scanned or merely perused; a world which, to the piercing eye of the healthy mind untouched by its contagion, appears like the amusement quarter of a big city in the hard brightness of a winter morning: desperately bare, disconsolate and ghostly.
The destructiveness of this disorder which originates from, and grows upon, obsessive addiction, lies in the fact that it stifles man’s primitive power of perceiving reality; that it makes man incapable not only of coming to himself but also of reaching reality and truth.
If such an illusory world threatens to overgrow and smother the world of real things, then to restrain the natural wish to see takes on the character of a measure of self-protection and self-defense. Man should oppose this virtually inescapable seduction with all the force of selfless self-preservation; he should hermetically close the inner room of his being against the intrusively boisterous pseudo-reality of empty shows and sounds. It is in such an asceticism of cognition alone that he may preserve or regain that which actually constitutes man’s vital existence: the perception of the reality of God and his creation, and the possibility of shaping himself and the world according to this truth, which reveals itself only in silence.
It would appear that Gabriel Marcel’s surmise that the concentration camps may reveal “the image of the world to come” is already obsolete. “Non-violent totalitarianism” is the most inhuman form of totalitarianism – among other reasons because it can always cite what appear to be valid arguments to prove that it is not what in fact it is. This consummate mendacity must inevitably result in the atrophy of communication between human beings, which is essentially based on trust. Martin Buber attempted to express this fact in the following terms: “In the future we may expect the total reciprocity of existential distrust to develop to a point at which speech will revert to silence.” (Of course not only does this breakdown in communication fail to eliminate “idle chatter” and mere verbiage, but it actually encourages them.) The possibility of such a breakdown in communication, Huxley says, [in Brave New World Revisited] never for a moment occurred to the early advocates of universal literacy and the freedom of the press: “They did not foresee what in fact has happened…the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant.”
Seeing, in itself, makes for happiness – and this, too, say the ancients, is a connection between contemplation and happiness. ‘We prefer seeing to all else’ – these words are to be found in the first chapter of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. If we did not already know that joy in seeing must be counted among the most elemental, irrepressible, coveted joys of mankind, we could deduce it from the everyday phenomenon of ‘concupiscence of the eyes’, the hypertrophy of visual curiosity, the morbidity of the contemporary craving to see. We can deduce it from the extent of this degeneration which, it seems, is imperiling specifically our most elemental and precious powers…This, incidentally, may suggest that the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry, empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.
Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation 12