3 - Suffering

Summary

It is necessarily easy to confuse the conceptual originariness of ‘sin’ with what is historically at the origin. Original sin belongs to the structure of concepts which, to constitute their own formality, disown that sin, blaming it on historical accident, on the eating of the apple that might have been avoided. A narrative mythology (not to say misogyny), a euhemerism or what Hegel himself calls ‘a priori fictions’, sustain concepts in general. And history has to be the history of guilt, for history is used to take the blame, arising when anxiety needs to be diverted, history invented as the vehicle, the scapegoat, to ride the blame away in a tragic expulsion. Thus can error be historicised, cast in the form of external necessity and bad contingency, made subordinate. That clears the stage for the poetics of reason I mentioned in the last chapter, acceding to a noble language of elegy so as to gesture that error might have been otherwise, being historical, indeed might never have been at all; while at the same time filling itself out through its jeremiad. Its mourning is its work, to speak the dialect of Glas. Sin and error, the tragedy of frivolity, can be deemed strokes of ill luck or chance that philosophy stoically suffers. But without bad luck there would be no history at all: what allows for bad luck also allows for good (together they are everything), and allows for history in general, i.e., a concept of possibility to be distinguished from that of potential.