More about the second language

There are of course some objections to the definition of enlightenment on the previous post. Peter Sloterdijk, whom I took the expression "second language" from (how could I have made it up myself?) relates enlightenment to asceticism, to detachment and mysticism, all in a very old language.



In Buddhist terms, for example, it would be the quest for nirvana, i.e. breaking up the wheel of births and deaths and soul transmigrations (all of which looks like a process for getting out-of-this-world, when translated into the second language). First sight, in consequence, you take a mystic and remove his/her spirituality and what's left?: a kind of self-torturer who is nowhere and has renounced to pretty much everything.

Maybe that kind of definition (enlightenment is simply the asceticism to get out-of-this-world) makes sense, more or less, when you stick to the old tranditions. For example even if people talk about something apparently so innofensive as "the quest of the self", it could actually be referring to the "Self" meaning the divine inside the individual -thus mystic and ascetic. My point is, when westerns look at enlightment and use the second language not as carefully as Sloterdijk, they (or I) might understand "self" without the devine; I might regard "dettachment" as an exercise to improve awareness (and the last one is again a confusing word, by the way).


Sloterdijk's proposal for the second language is so interesting: to try to translate more acuratelly some of these important words in a way everybody (religious or not) could agree with -since there is a source of misunderstanding when two people think about the same word in different ways, obviously.

But honestly (and very humbly) I don't like his definitions; there are a few words for which I would like to find a writter or a phylosopher or a thinker that could have made an alternative interpretation. Enlightenment according E. Fromm is one of them; others to come are redemption, liberation and devotion.