Arquivo para a ‘Linguagens’ Categoria
Religions and evil
04
Oct
One of the biggest mistakes, already developed
in some of the posts, is the Manichaean duality of evil x good, without understanding that evil is precisely the absence of good, great Christian thinker, Augustine of Hippo converted precisely by abandoning Manichaeism.
Religious concepts that have long been forgotten, or that are submerged in mistaken preaching, impede what would be the “natural flow of humanity towards the enlightenment of the soul”, evil has deep-rooted sources in the form of old thoughts and emotional burdens from the past and, despite obsolete, still persist, hindering the progress of souls.
The remedy would be very simple, the closer the soul is to enlightenment, the less evil is present, and the more enlightened souls make the world more empathetic, harmonious and free from injustice.
The ethics and morals that derive from the need for civilizing progress do not find space if there are not souls and people in prominent positions with clear and convincing illumination, that is why evil has become a social, theological or ideological issue, and the both times.
It’s not just Christian thinkers who say this, Hannah Arendt talks about the Banality of Evil, Nietzsche about the “death of God” (or how we “kill” Him, of course impossible), Paul Ricoeur and Lévinas about the Other and Byung Chul Han about the “ Society of Fatigue” speaks of the vita contemplativa as a complement to the vita activa (which Hanna Arendt also spoke of), even remembering Christian thinkers.
The return of threats of war, the social crisis of moral values (everything is permitted!), before a true civilizational crisis occurs, a new enlightenment of souls is necessary (in Picture st. Francis expelling devils from Arezzo, by Benozzo Gozzoli).
The lack of understanding of subjectivity and human imagination, or its submission to unenlightened values, the absence of compassion towards others, the misunderstanding of progress as having fundamental positive aspects, even to save the civilizing process, leads society to exhaustion , disbelief or the fatality of wars and hatred.
It is not difficult to find positions in newspapers and social media in favor of the process of excluding people with a certain opinion, religion or even simple disagreement with dubious moral values (see the case of abortion in Brazil at the moment), the debates are sterile and instead of arguments the reactions are sarcasm and irony.
They are seeds of the broader process of civilizational crisis in progress and detected by great thinkers since the last century, crediting them to new media, to the resurgence of nationalism and authoritarian currents is to look only at the consequence, the root is the absence of enlightened souls who help humanity to contemplate its future with greater grandeur.
*When Francisco was in Arezzo, there was a great scandal and a war almost throughout the city, day and night, because of two factions that had long hated each other.
Exercises for political reflection
03
Oct
When we enter Manichaeism we only perceive
opposing forces without clearly discerning where evil and ethics lie, every philosophical exercise about evil is seen from a moral perspective.
However, what is moral has become confused, precisely because power has become confused with violence, and Hannah Arendt’s reflection on this is quite enlightening: “Power and violence are opposites; where one absolutely dominates, the other is absent (ARENDT, Between the past and the future: Eight exercises for political reflection, 1961).
The philosopher’s argument is simple, difficult to understand in a polarized world, but I would say it is the first of her reflections on politics when power is exercised legitimately, violence is absent. This means that in a healthy political system, power must be based on consent and voluntary cooperation, rather than resorting to violence to impose the will of one group over others, as there is no consent by others.
Much of political reasoning today is to exercise violence against opposites, this is its own denial, Arendt argued that freedom and political action are synonymous, since politics has no meaning enclosed in itself, the famous bubbles, being free is a necessary condition for political exercise, the exercise of citizenship, any limitation becomes violence.
Freedom exists as a plural condition of man, in religious terms it is free will, in social terms it is the possibility of acting freely as a citizen and having protection for this, if this condition is removed there is no other definition to the system other than the authoritarianism.
Just as in the arts: music, dance and theater, political action is valued as a “virtue”, all serious theories since Plato aimed at this participation in the “polis”, even Machiavelli’s amoral concept of virtú, performance requires a “audience” and a space for the spectacle to take place, in Arendt’s view, the Greek polis was “a kind of amphitheater where freedom could appear (Arendt, 2001, p. 201).
Listening to the contradictory, allowing it to express itself is a necessary condition for politics, the model of excluding opponents is nothing more than a euphemism for dictators.
Arendt does not fail to analyze the violence advocated by Marx, and returns to Aristotle’s zoon politikon, poorly read by hasty readers: “… which may be difficult to perceive, but what Marx, who knew Aristotle very well, must have been conscious” (ARENDT, 2001).
And he continues: “Aristotle’s double definition of man as a zoon lógon ékhon, a being who reaches his maximum possibility in the faculty of speech and in life in a polis, was intended to distinguish the Greeks from the barbarians, and the free man from the slave. The distinction was that the Greeks” (Arendt, 2001, p.50), living in a polis […] conducted their actions through discourse, through persuasion, and not through violence and through mute coercion.
For philosophy it would have been a contradiction in terms to “realize Philosophy” or transform the world in accordance with Philosophy without it being preceded by an interpretation, thus Heidegger warned that Marx’s statement “philosophers have interpreted the world, now it is up to transform it” is contradictory, because you must think about what transformation you want.
ARENDT, Hannah. Between the Past and the Future Trans. Mauro W. Barbosa de Almeida. 5th ed. Brazilian edition, São Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva, 2001. Em english (pdf)
War attrition and peace in Nagorno-Karabakh
02
Oct
As the Russian/Ukrainian war enters a phase of
attrition, a border region has a sign of peace, even if it means a loss of territory.
The struggle for dominance over the Armenian-majority region of Nagorno-Karabakh goes back centuries, however the president of the self-declared republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, Samvel Shaharamanyan declared that it would cease to exist from the 1st. January 2023.
In the 18th century, when the region was under pressure from Persia, Russian Tsarina Catherine II issued letters of protection to them, but the conflict was never fully resolved.
The signed decree dissolved all state institutions that will be vacated by the beginning of 2024, and more than 100,000 Armenians have already left the country, which already has the presence of military personnel from Azerbaijan, with a Muslim majority and supported by Turkey, Armenia is Christian and supported by Russia.
The region has geopolitical importance because since Russia’s war against Ukraine, Azerbaijan has supplied millions of barrels of oil to the European Union through the Caspian Sea along the Mediterranean coast, and recently Russia announced that it will no longer supply it.
The Armenian genocide of 1915-1916 during the Otman Empire led many Armenians to flee to this region of Nagorno-Karabakh, since then they have been called Azeris, during the Russian revolution the region continued in conflict with Azerbaijan, although both were Soviet republics, the anti-Armenians in the city of Shusha killed 30 thousand Armenians.
With the end of the Soviet Union, the Armenians once again established themselves as a nation, but the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict remained, there were several periods of fighting in the region, now with the session of the territory this autonomous republic ceases to exist.
Despite the fears of separatist Armenians, this new situation is a great sign of peace.
Russia and Ukraine can be inspired by this model or something similar, the world wants peace.
Good people can do evil
29
Sep
Far from the aporia (ignorance of evil) is the
realization of good, the universal good, the common good, the good that sees and explains the will of the Other, the one that eliminates the symbolic nature of evil.
Hell is paved with good will, but it is not quite like that, because if it is a right intention it can produce fruit at the right time, but there is good not done and poorly done, that is evil.
There is a determination in the will, which is intention, the topic has already been treated by countless philosophers, most clearly in phenomenology where it is an essential category, but intention requires a habit, and making it a habit requires courage and determination.
There is confusion about intention and confusing it with purpose, psychologists don’t like the term very much because it involves the future and places the cause of behavior in individuals and not in their life history, many hasty and mistaken judgments start from “purpose”. .
However, a purpose made in order to overcome traumas, bad conditioning or something that disturbs a healthy and intentionally active mind for personal and social good, is a purpose that leads to an intention linked to consciousness.
In philosophy, the term intention is linked to and is a subcategory of consciousness, and this is very different from the magical action that some defend as the “law of attraction”, which is why psychologists do not like it, it is about activating consciousness and with this make the intention healthy.
This conscious intention leads to a flow of learning that re-elaborates and makes clearer awareness of the possibilities and healthy perspectives for life and makes the future present in actions that lead to this learning and elaboration of intention.
So it’s possible for someone to go and not go, just as it’s possible for someone to say maybe I’m not going, but ends up going, assuming, of course, a healthy direction of a straight intention.
A biblical parable that explains what will is in a fuller sense is the one that tells how a father who owns a vineyard invites his two sons to go and work in the vineyard (Mt 21,28-30), the first one said I will and no It was, the second one said I won’t go and it was, which of the two fulfilled the father’s wishes, everyone responded that it was the second one, so intention is different from purpose and is related to conscience.
The structures of evil
28
Sep
If evil is the absence of good, it is also possible
that in our individual actions, through carelessness, intention or even malice, wanting to do good we do evil, as Ricoeur explained in symbolic evil.
After evil is socially structured, it seems to give meaning to what in full awareness we know is not moral or socially correct, it is not about political correctness here, but that structure of meaning that is given through symbolic language, a crude example, but what is the point here, the different types of prejudice that enter society.
It can be didactically divided into three topics, the first being within human experience, the second within various discourses where evil has a philosophical importance of aporia, this is part of philosophical thinking, and the third as a determination of the language that asks whether evil exists in itself or is a reality of naming things and actions around existence.
It is therefore possible to discuss it outside the Manichaean sense, they are not opposing poles, but rather symbolic structures that penetrate our daily lives as experience, as aporia (difficulty or rational doubt about their objective existence) or symbolic element of language.
The symbolism of evil was deeply developed in Paul Ricoeur’s book, it is linked to human transcendence that somehow determines the denial of the positive values of human existence: defense of life, appreciation of solidarity, protection of the weakest, etc. aporia is one that, due to its clear indefiniteness, falls into the indeterminacy of good.
Aporia not only denies evil, it denies human evolution (social, technological, ecological and moral), it ignores the imaginary, transcendence and moral values beyond the apparent ones, it denies the Other, imagining that in this way I will be affirming its Being, which in truth does not understands it or is not integrated, thus prevailing an idealistic rigidity about what transcendence would be.
Building our inner being, placing it at the service of society in every way, in solidarity with everyone else, is not just a good thing, it is a condition for civilizational evolution (ecological cities, for example, image)
Civilization evolves not only because it builds new structures, technologies and human values, but because at some point in this process it goes through imagination, transcendence and looking at the Other and around.
Narrative and ethical coherence
27
Sep
Polarization has led to ethical relativism and ethical
relativism leads to social instability, there is no coherence between what is said and what is done, everything is done to justify this or that view.
Ethical coherence must accompany all of our lives or it is not ethics, just a convenient behavior, we need to cultivate it in social, professional, religious and family terms, it is not just in one area because the behavior becomes a habit.
The nudity at a university volleyball game (sporting event at a university), the discussion about abortion, the logic of ideological political punishment and the emblematic speeches in the country’s official bodies are not a mere coincidence, they are not autocratic attempts, they are the lack of results of a long social process where ethics does not predominate.
An ethics professor at a university, after discussing a subject in class, asked students during the break to write down at least one unethical act in the canteen: feet on the wall, papers on the floor, jumping in line, etc., when all students returned from break they had something to tell.
It is also not about exaggeration or the absence of punishment, but the fair measure, what in law is called disproportionate punishment, but the absence of punishment is also dangerous.
The problem is that Discipline and Punish is a process that can lead to the logic of a madhouse, Foucault in his famous book shows that justice in his time stopped applying deadly torture and started seeking the “correction” of criminals, but the practices Educational measures are rare and today even worse, it has become unilateral, that is, the punishment depends on the condition and situation of the defendant.
It is what Byung Chul Han called psychopolitics, a kind of return to torture through propaganda and a distorted view of true social problems, it is about fighting the “enemy”, and the law only applies in this case.
The narratives confuse society, create religious holes and animosities, are not conducive to any healthy social process, create more division and injustice.
The Symbolism of evil
21
Sep
One of Paul Ricoeur’s characteristics is the search
for explanations about who men are and the circumstances that affect them, among them there is an approach to evil as it affects all people, directly or not.
This search in philosophy comes from Plato, who defined the Supreme as: the final destiny of all things, which for Aristotle is the best good, linked to the logos, thus science, while in Christian philosophy it will be God and paradise.
Also important is the Neoplatonic thought of Augustine of Hippo, for whom evil is the absence of good, and thus is not its opposite, but its absence.
Medieval philosophy associates Good with paradise and evil with that which leads man to his destruction, not only in eternal life, but already in this life, see for example Boethius in his “Philosophical Consolations” and Thomas Aquinas for whom it is an “imperfection” of the Being, of virtues in the nature of the being, which deprives it of good.
In contemporary philosophy, the idealist and Enlightenment vision relativizes it and will almost inevitably fall into Manichaean views of evil and good, that is, arbitrary, much more dependent on conventions and social collusion.
Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas stand out in their treatment of good, they revisited the question of the relationship between good and being in a similar and different way.
For Levinas, good precedes being, but it is not in consciousness or in discourse, thus it transcends being, thus defining it as the otherness of being, that which links it to infinity and its ontological sense, it is that of the ethics of Other.
Paul Ricoeur, when penetrating through hermeneutics more deeply into the question of evil, takes up the question of myth, especially the Adamic myth (Cain killed Abel) where myth “is the sought-after place of fusion between history and fiction” (Ricoeur, 1976, p. 295), but also addresses the “symbolic” issue of evil.
This text cited above is fundamental to understanding Ricoeur’s thought because he deals with it within what for him is today’s “crisis of philosophy”.
The symbolic issue of evil is the salvific death that does not end, but reinscribes the history of humanity in mythical guidelines and even the Enlightenment and idealism are not outside this, as they will create symbolic structures of “salvation” of man.
Ricouer, P. (1976) La philosophie aujourd´hui: entretien sur ce qu´on appelle la crisis de la philosophie. Lousanne: Grammont-Salvat, 1976.
Ricoeur, Paul. (1969) The Symbolism of Evil. Boston : Beacon Press.
The return of evil
19
Sep
Even if due to naivety or social context, from time
to time demons, existing or not, come back to haunt us, there is a truth between reality and fiction: it exists, if not in the imaginary (as some think) also as a real entity.
Horror films, almost all mere fiction, exist, and their audience is not small, as in the case of “The Exorcist” (1973) and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (1980), two classics of the genre, but there are films that can stand out as works of art: “Nosferatu” (1922 and remake 2018) and “Get Out!” by director and screenwriter Jordan Peele, who competed for the Oscar for best film in 2018.
In the work directed by F. W. Murnau (1922) there is something of German expressionism, with techniques of using shadows, treated more as a madness around the unknown, also remember that we are in between the wars when Germany and Russia sign the Treaty of Ropallo, trying to form a counterweight in the global geopolitics of the time, an agreement that would last until Hitler.
There are certainly other films, however, they are now reappearing with a more strongly religious tone and color: “The Pope’s Exorcist” (Julius Avery, released this year) which talks about events that happened to Father Gabriele Amorth, who was officially an exorcist from Rome recognized by the Church Catholic, in the film directed by Russell Crowe (Guys – Nice Guys, War Promises – The Water Diviner), the other demon film is Nefarious (Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon, based on the 2016 novel by Steve Deace: A Nefarious plot) .
While Nefarious is another fiction about the existence and tricks of the Devil, with some Christian contours, The Pope’s Exorcist is based on real events narrated by Father Gabriele himself, who performed more than 60 thousand exorcisms and certainly some notable ones were selected, among From the conversations that are narrated there, I quote the most important one, in which during a possession he says that the devil can only do what God has allowed, his power is limited.
I don’t like the genre, but I had more patience with “The Pope’s Exorcist” out of curiosity and an attempt to understand the problem, but situated in a context of confusing social issues and the danger of an even bloodier war than those currently underway, but Without Manichaeism, the power of evil is not greater than that of good, and its effects are not comparable.
Evil has a real existence due to the absence of good, so thought Augustine of Hippo, who was a Manichaean in his youth.
Civilization, crisis and anger
15
Sep
The civilizing process, which involved wars and
wars, was also marked by other major crises, coincidence or not, simple natural fact or divine intervention, the black plague from 1347 to 1353 which killed 50 million people, a high number for the population at the time. , anticipates a moment of crisis at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance.
Today there is no correction that can be called “cynical” given the current connotation of the word, but Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason applies well to skeptics: they do not believe in any morality, they do not believe in civility, and they bring anger and social anger leads to contempt.
The political event is the fall of Constantinople, on May 29, 1453, which gave rise to the Ottoman Empire, which later expanded throughout Europe, putting an end to the Byzantine Empire, of course together with a cultural movement that revived classical Greek teaching.
Also at the beginning of the First World War we had the Spanish flu, of course a correlation between epidemics, crises and wars is not so simple and easy to understand, however the fact that periods of civilizational crises led to wars and the birth of new empires is a fact , after all, after the fall of Constantinople, the Turkish-Ottoman Empire was born, which was until the first world war.
The existence of hate, of intolerance is practically inherent to wars, there is no shortage of justifications for a certain type of “justice”, there are several arguments for hate, for peace there is only one: love of life and appreciation for the civilizing process, perhaps it is time to reverse the logic of war: conquest.
We will only enter into a civilizing process worthy of humanity, if we abandon the primitive methods of correcting errors and injustices, almost always subject to narratives, a true process of human development worthy of the name cannot be carried out with the practice of wars and genocides with attempts to euphemisms that soften the cruelty.
The book of Ecclesiasticus says (Eccl 17:33): “Resentment and anger are detestable things, even the sinner seeks to dominate them”, and error must always give way to forgiveness and reconciliation, how many times? The biblical reading says: “seventy times seven” (Mt 18,21).
The developing process points to the outbreak of a war whose consequences are very worrying due to the power of weapons, technologies and global involvement.
There is always a possible opposite attitude, a virtuous circle is always possible, will it come?
Stoics, Epicureans and Cynics
14
Sep
Seneca was a lawyer and a great writer, but he was
questioned a lot and is still Nero’s tutor today, it is good to remember that legend or fact Nero condemned him to suicide for treason, and the philosopher was consistent with his theory against anger and did so patiently.
His phrase is also famous: “If I decided to go through one of the current republics one by one, I would not find any capable of tolerating the wise man or one that the wise man could tolerate”, he was thus aware of his time and perhaps this is the reason why he is returning “the fashion”.
He was different from the Epicureans because he defended the public involvement of philosophers, after all this was the first argument in Plato’s time to found his academy, but Seneca even stated in “The Retreat”, that in certain circumstances it would be better to withdraw from public life, but this never meant an omission, and he explains it in “The Withdrawal” this way:
“We float, being tossed from side to side; desired things, we abandon; what was put aside, we resume. Thus, we alternate in a permanent flow of voluptuousness and regret. We are entirely conditioned by the opinions of others.”
In times of polarization, not always rational, it is also a reason for him to come back to the fore.
In addition to the Epicurean “purists” and the “retired” Stoics like Seneca, there are the Cynics, while the former valued “natural” aspects, the behavior of the Cynic philosophers pointed to a philosophical distinction between natural aspects (physis) and human customs. (nomos), a problem that permeated all the philosophical thought of Ancient Greece, reaching, in a certain way, also to the nominalists and realists of the Middle Ages.
I remember the critique of cynical reason, the work of Peter Sloterdijk, to say that the problem is current and it is no coincidence that these currents resurface, although updated by social and political problems, they point to a civilizational crisis.
The society that tries to eliminate pain, suffering, that worships “nature” is also reminiscent of the Stoics, those that try to destroy human culture and customs are reminiscent of the cynics, it must be said here that it does not mean the common sense of saying the which is not true.
Antisthenes, from Athens, and Diogenes, from Sinope, were the first cynics, they lived despising the customs and “sages” of their time, Sloterdijk says that today “is not a time suitable for thought” and in a way he is right, Cynicism comes from the Greek word kynikos, which means dogs because of the way they lived abandoned on the streets and often begging for alms.
In these thinkers there is a background of reason why they should be studied, they knew the crisis that the civilization of their time was going through, they were looking for a happy life within a troubled society and away from the false problems of their contemporaries, but Seneca and others did not omit themselves in public life, which is why they taught to value suffering and understand why.
