Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Torture sought to force heretics to experience the supremacy of practical purposes.

Properties2
tagsja-picks, deepthinking, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, xref, category/causal-relationships
aliases@wiggershaus_frankfurt_1994, loc. 1285

2 min read

Torture sought to force heretics to experience the supremacy of practical purposes.

Evidence

Pain plays a special role here. The madman appears to be detached, to be standing outside, he lives in another world, removed from the constraints of the present. Pain calls us back into the present (think of the various ways of waking people from sleep!), and reduces people to defensive reactions, to seeing an escape from pain as being their one goal, it binds them to that purpose. The notion that heretics ought to recant was only the rationalization for torturing them. In a much deeper sense, they were to be made the equals of their tormentors: in the sense that they were to experience physically, in their own bodies, the supremacy of practical purposes. Again and again, it was to be shown that freedom is not possible. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1285

Categorization

  • DEEPTHINKING: A dense, paradigm-shifting idea: that recantation is only a rationalization, the real point being to make the heretic physically experience that freedom is impossible — that pain re-binds people to purposive reality.
  • XREF: connects to: Public torture was spectacle designed to display sovereign power publicly — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 83; Torture aimed to bind victims to practical purposes, not merely extract recantations. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1285; Torture persisted because it revealed truth and displayed power — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 110 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

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