Arquivo para a ‘Linguagens’ Categoria
Looking at things from above
21
Apr
Miracles or prophecies are not necessary for us to understand that even in
the most earthly realities there are things from above, and they respond to the most earthly realities, without them we cannot find exits and paths to a full, happy and peaceful life.
Without ethical, moral and responsible values, finding safe ways out of conflicts, situations of insecurity or injustice is almost impossible, as one error does not correct another error, and only an action of love and solidarity resolves a conflict of hatred and division.
From division to division, from hate to hate, we walk with an earthly look at our difficulties, it does not mean that we should take our feet off the ground and have rational decisions, it means that without serenity and serious and proactive attitudes we only make what is wrong worse.
It is common even for people of good will to appeal to violence and force, even if the side of justice and solidarity is the right side, acting with recklessness and cruelty takes away the value of this act of force, the greatest act of force is responsibility. act with firmness, education and truth.
If we are troubled, anxious and out of balance, we cannot find the path of wisdom, hear that inner voice of common sense, clarity and truth.
It also serves as well as for questions of justice and right for the true cultural and religious values, the use of authoritarianism, which means in this context false authority that many want to have before the office or position they have, they make the mistake of the authority argument and fall into the easy trap of too much power.
They want to be imbued with a halo of goodness when they invest themselves against simple people, but the grace to raise hearts to higher values and remove them from difficult situations is not achieved.
For Christians, one of the most significant passages after the Passover of Jesus that we recall a little while ago in Christian culture is the episode of Emmaus in which, while Jesus was walking among them and they did not realize it, they were still ruminating on the violent death of the Master, but they were blind and did not understood correctly the victory of the one they crucified.
Jesus asks: “What are you talking about along the way?” They stopped, with sad faces, and one of them, named Cleopas, said to him: “Are you the only pilgrim in Jerusalem who does not know what has happened there these last few days?” (Luke, 24, 15-18) and gave their earthly version of the Passover.
And Jesus (still without being recognized) how to explain the meaning, already reviewed by the prophets: “Wouldn’t the Christ have to suffer all these things and enter into his glory?” (Luke 24,26).
Gradually their hearts warmed up and in the end they understood that they were walking with the Master and then they asked them to stay with him because the night was coming, but Jesus disappeared.
It is not necessary to have this vision or even to have this faith, it is necessary to listen to the voice from above, of healthy values.
Coldness: from essence to appearance
18
Apr
Empathy, patience, true love and true feelings seem distant, bodies adorned,
made up and tattooed, minds distant and cold, empty and lacking in inspired ideas.
I read in the book “The book thief” (2005): “perhaps this is a fair punishment for those who do not have a heart: only realizing this when you can no longer go back”, is a harsh sentence, but it was important to analyze my social, personal and friendship context.
My inspiration to read, write and search within institutions, environments and social media for something intelligent, inspired and sweet, productive where I can find different paths from what I see and feel around me, made me understand and admire Markus Zusak’s book, at least unless I remember the 2013 edition (year of film), she was looking for a refuge, an escape from the contextual situation.
I wonder if this situation about the tension of a possible large-scale war is different, I see a lot of hypocrisy and manipulation in the air, while innocent people die in a stupid war, others prepare for an even bigger confrontation that slowly spreads across the globe.
I remember a biblical passage (Thessalonians 1,5:3) when they say: “There is peace and security, then sudden destruction will come upon them, like birth pangs on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape”, but for those in a hurry I remember that it is written that this will not mean the end.
Sincere efforts for peace are lacking, armed spirits cannot promote any peace, they want allies for their temporal power, a timeless message is lacking, beyond immediate interests.
This is how hearts walk, and schools and the everyday life of the simplest and most fleeting life have already arrived, I saw a housewife from a small town excited in the supermarket speaking against that politician who ruined everything and a child who cried over a political situation that I didn’t quite understand.
You can’t put out a fire with gasoline, says popular wisdom, but poetry is no longer in the air, there are no songs that speak of pure love, only immediate interests of an erotic drive, in a society that actually lives “The agony of Eros”, a profound book by Byung Chul Han.
It is not a certain popular singer who speaks against teaching and good education, society echoes these hymns and there is almost no way to succeed without emotional and passionate appeals out of tune.
The dismantling of the human vision as Being and its transformation into the utilitarian vision of Having had a historical origin in Western thought and now penetrates and tries to destroy its meaning.
Zusak, Markus. (2005) The book Thief. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Art, the awareness and the divine
14
Apr
Art is an expression of the human soul, “it says the unspeakable, expresses the
inexpressible, translates the untranslatable” it is a phrase attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, without it we cannot humanly express the beautiful and we are not opposed to the destructive and reductive vision of the simple look only what we see.
Humanity has built devices to see and feel further and further away, the James Webb telescope is making us look and study the deepest part of the universe, but an entire universe exists in each human soul and even the most advanced technological device can translate it or imitate her.
This indeed is the great human delusion, the myth of machinic intelligence that surpasses human intelligence, called the singular point, the desire for eternal life transporting human feelings to machines, the human delirium built advanced technologies, which is good, but imagining it as endowed with human soul and emotions is a delusion of those who do not believe that in the mystery of the infinite universe there is a consciousness of a Being and not of rocks and chemical compounds.
The fact that we got confused in the course of history, reducing it to idealist subjectivism, is not worthy of the human journey, not even of science that for Edgar Morin it is necessary to return to the point where we see and admit uncertainty, after all this is one of the quantum principles.
Recently an Integrated Information Theory (ITT) term created by Giulio Tononi, created the idea that it was possible to calculate a “phi” number representing the connectivity of networks, be it the brain, a circuit or the atom, now this idea has advanced and scientists claim that it is possible to calculate this “phi”,
Researcher and cognitive scientist Susan Schneider, told New Scientist. “I believe that mathematics can help us understand the neural basis of consciousness in the brain, and perhaps even machines, but it will inevitably leave something out: the quality of that experience, felt internally.”
For Christians, even the disciples found it hard to believe what they saw after the resurrection of Jesus, they went to the tomb and saw “a gardener”, they walked to Emmaus and did not realize that they were accompanying him and finally Thomas wanted to “touch his wounds” so that to believe.
In John 20:27, Jesus tells him: “Put your finger here and look at my hands. Extend your hand and place it in my side. And be not unbelieving, but faithful”, to those who believe this is a fact.
For a philosophy of the look
13
Apr
It already exists, I even looked for the roots and couldn’t find it and that’s where
the problem lies, dialoguing with what is present in culture, philosophy and art about what the look is and how it is possible to develop it from there onwards in order to dialogue with contemporary culture.
For example, a good reading of Schiller we have already mentioned this week his “Aesthetic education of man”, in art I did not quote Gustav Klimt on purpose, he has elements of symbolism and all art literature recognizes it, but his “art nouveaux” brings something again (photo of his work the hug).
Edgar Morin, when analyzing “Mass culture of the 20th century”, emphasizes the multiple meanings of modern man: “the language adapted to this anthropos is audiovisual, the language of four instruments: image, musical sound, word, writing. A language that is all the more accessible insofar as it is the polytonic involvement of all languages” (page 45) and thus this look can be both dispersed and integrated, giving this new language a new look.
It is no longer specific to a single medium (sound, image and objects have existed as art since time immemorial), for Morin this is “of the game that lies on the fabric of practical life” (idem) and this symbolism in Klimt is in fact a vision integrated, but not specific to him, I also see it in Kandinsky his works also seem to have music and poetry, even though they are just pictures.
In cinema, the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, in one of the paintings of this film Life, integrates painting and cinema by giving movement to Van Gogh’s paintings, thus, more than multimedia, these artistic movements can be called transmedia, due to the fact that they integrate aspects of art .
This re-educates and stimulates the look, but there is the aspect of the possibility of dispersing the look, but nothing can do this more than modern horizontal monomedia and social “media” are not out of it, so the re-education of the look goes through the stimulation of other senses and the spiritual that is not that idealist (see previous post) that are separated.
So, despite being a symbolist, it is fair to think of Klimt as a member of “art nouveaux”, since he helped to create the Secession Movement in Vienna, whose objective was to break the conservative traditions that were rooted in history and create an internationalist and comprehensive vision. of contemporary and timeless artistic genres.
The integration of this vision in new media is the presentation at the historic Atelie des Lumiéres, in Paris, of a transmedia animation of Vang Gogh (foto), which inaugurated a series in 2018 precisely with the work of Gustav Klimt also animated.
For this reason, it is not a synthesis of opposites, but the fusion of artistic horizons in movement, the current crisis is the dualistic vision of the world, of art and of values that are timeless.
MORIN, Edgar. (1997) Cultura de massas do século XX (Twentieth-century mass culture(. trans. Maura Ribeiro Sardinha. 9th. edition. Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Forense ed., 1997.
What is beautiful for idealism
12
Apr
We contradicted in the previous post the vision of vision and beauty of
the idealist sense, but Schiller himself is a descendant of this vision, even though he tried to rebuild “the unity of human nature”, in this he is right, he thought of rebuilding in the modern idealist way.
For Hegel, aesthetics, and therefore the Beauty, is the science that deals with the artistic beauty and not the natural beauty, for him the natural beauty is a product of the spirit (Geist), and, because it is a product of the spirit, it participates in the truth and what exists in nature, see that the spirit as well as the idealist “transcendence” is linked to nature and to the human, it is far from the mystical spiritual.
For an internal revolution to idealism, three currents of art are immersed in it: symbolism, classicism and romanticism, for many modern authors, I quote Byung Chul Han, the culture of the smooth, the flat and the “transparent” (glass, glass, etc.) plastics, etc.).
This pseudo-revolution that took place within idealist art is called self-overcoming, a kind of what was called in German idealism the New Hegelians, but it makes an even deeper division in art: painting, music and poetry.
Sculpture is considered a “noble” art, says Hegel: ““Sculpture introduces God himself into the objectivity of the external world; thanks to it, individuality manifests itself externally through its spiritual side” (Hegel, 1996, p. 113), again the exterior is objective, a sculpture and not a Being, the other and with him all his subjectivity.
Symbolism, on the other hand, was the one that “seeks to achieve the union between internal meaning and external form, that classical art achieved this union in the representation of the substantial individuality that addresses our sensibility, and that romantic art, spiritual in essence, surpassed” (Hegel, 1996, p. 340).
Seeing the consequences of this “romantic” thought, Hans-Georg Gadamer will criticize Dilthey’s romantic vision of consciousness, with serious consequences for modern historicism, almost all of which are idealistic and distant from reality, thus creating the “ideal” model for consciousness is for the beautiful and not to transform it as the idealists think to do.
I consider art nouveau, mainly by Antoni Gaudí (in the photo Casa Batlló, in Barcelona) the most faithful expression because it recovers natural elements (light, color, air and nature) without “affections” and traces of symbolism and romanticism, such as for example, present in the “Style Tiffany” in the United States or the “Style Glasgow” in the United Kingdom that has elements, in my view, of symbolism, although also called “art nouveau”.
Returning to the previous post, there is a confusing vision of ethics because it is separated from aesthetics.
What does it mean to see
11
Apr
We explore blindness a lot in our posts: philosophical (in Plato’s Republic,
the myth of the cave), logical (Parmenides, Russell, Hilbert, etc.), religious (Feuerbach, Hegel, etc.) and literary (Saramago’s blindness essay and the Plague of Camus), just to name a few, besides them we navigated about the language in Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Levinas, Ricoeur and others.
Now we want to navigate through the world of vision, said Bachelard: “all beings are pure because they are beautiful”, while the poet Alberto Caeiro “the world was not made for us to think about it, but for us to look and agree, also the Russian philosopher and mystic Nicolas Berdjaev (there are many Russian mystics) used to say that in Paradise there is no ethics and there is only aesthetics, all this to say that seeing is having eyes for beauty, which is why many things today that are ugly are self-proclaimed beautiful, so the inversion is not just ethical .
The ugly was for Plato, from the ontological point of view, the almost-nothing, the sensible world being what is apparently real, being mere shadows of ideas (the myth of the cave) and the ideal (eidos) the truly real, thus the ugly it is formless and has no real existence and is not a universal model.
It is not unnatural that in a fragmented world, on the brink of its polycrisis, beauty almost disappears, and so man does not see it, what he sees are shadows, drafts of diffuse and confused ideas, the universal model disappears and discourse is merely discourse. of the conflict.
We like the point, straight and flat, but this is Euclid’s Geometry, the world is not straight and flat.
The beautiful emerges in harmony, suggests fusion where there is division, confuses the chaotic by giving it form and even the world of pure form is no longer geometric it is fractal, not fractional, but a natural fraction belonging to the whole of the less significant part of the whole body (in the photo the Lorentz fractal and the butterfly effect).
From the logical point of view it is the approximation of chaos theory (there is chaotic logic), from the philosophical point of view it is the view of complexity (the simple is almost always simplistic), from the religious point of view one can say: “God created everything and saw that it was good” (and beautiful), from a literary point of view I think the best expression was Friedrich Schiller (1756-1805): “How are we going to rebuild the unity of human nature, which seems completely suppressed by this original opposition and radical?”(page 71), wrote in his work “Educação Estética do Homem”, about the division inside man between the formal impulse that drags him in the dimension of his time.
Seen as a poet it is a wonderful work, as a philosophy it is subject to criticism due to the historical distance of its time and the walls of the German ideology of its time.
SCHILLER, F. (1989) “Educação Estética do Homem numa série de cartas”, trad. Roberto Schwartz e Márcio Suzuki, Brazil, São Paulo: Editora Iluminuras.
Thought from on High and Communion
06
Apr
What kind of knowledge is this that encompasses knowledge “from above”,
beyond the human, but without contradicting it, Morin’s response and others such as Martin Buber, Emannuel Lévinas and Paul Ricoeur seem to lead to the same point, to go towards the Other without reservation.
Two mystical falsifications are possible in this direction, one that denies conscience and respect for the Other, those who appeal to a false Christian religiosity, the Bible is clear: “If anyone declares: “I love God!”, but hates his brother, he is a liar” (1 John, 4:20-21), but there are those who cry out for the extreme opposite of the materiality of faith, to these the biblical answer is also clear: “Man shall not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4 ,4), curiously opposes and does not dialogue.
Curious because the vision of the last supper of Jesus with his disciples, his great memorial and his eternal presence in his materiality (flesh and blood), is the cause of much controversy and divergence, both true that he broke the bread, and true who declared his divinity.
Thinking things from above cannot fail to have its concreteness, its materiality, you see that bread is not wheat, but wheat transformed by human hands into bread, just like wine.
It does not fail to have the most sacred and divine aspect when asking the disciples to do this in his memory and in his name, thus it is renewed and divinized by the human hands that repeat it.
How to understand communion without the presence of the Other, without dialogic with the opposite, without this paradox of understanding that even with opposition, new horizons are possible, as advocated by the hermeneutic circle, which asks that preconceptions be left “in parentheses” before .
We have a vision of truth, logic and rationality, but true communion is only possible with a step further, the belief that something divine also belongs to the Other, to the different and the opposite of my worldview, there is no communion without this , there is only tolerance.
I have always asked myself why wars, hunger, misery, injustice among men, my answer today is that there is no true communion among men, perhaps some small tolerance, some respect that hides true interests, perhaps a respect that is even human but not divine.
The polycrisis and thinking aloud
05
Apr
When we think only of everyday things, they are important and even fundamental, we often fail to perceive what is deeper involved in them, the thought and culture in which we are immersed and which are rapidly pointing to a polycrisis.
The word coined by Morin was taken up again in an interview with Le Monde, where he emphasized: “The health crisis triggered a chain of crises that were linked together. This polycrisis or megacrisis extends from the existential to the political, passing through the economy, from the individual to the planetary, passing through families, regions, States. In short, a tiny virus in an overlooked village in China has unleashed the disruption of a world” (Le Monde, April 20, 2020).
In his book VI of Method: Ethics, he explains: “Our civilization separates more than it connects. We are in a deficit of reconnection and this has become a vital necessity”, so it is impossible not to think about things from above: empathy, civility, cordiality and other values that little by little were being lost and brutalizing us as a civilization.
As a complex thinker, his thinking is antidisciplinary (in the sense of rigid specialties) and transdisciplinary (in the sense of recovering the whole lost in rigid boundaries of thought that define only one aspect of life).
Operators of complex thinking (the book Introduction to Complexity is fundamental) is, as the word itself says, intricate and comprehensive, but I highlight two essential points of its method, the dialogic and hologramatic aspect.
The dialogical considers the union of opposite and contradictory terms as complementary, for example life and death, this paradox is lived in the sacred sense in this Easter week, although it is not limited to the religious, it can and should be thought of in the existential and political.
The hologramatic points out that the apparent paradox of systems are component parts of a whole (in picture the universe formation), just as each part has prefigured an aspect of the whole, the most common example is that of the kaleidoscope, but that of the human body is also interesting, each part is alive by the functioning of the whole and helps the whole to function.
We behave like fans who are fanatical and disinterested in the whole for exercising too much a material, purely earthly and human culture that makes the whole, the high and the divine inconceivable in everyday life.
Belonging, inclusion and innocence
31
Mar
The question raised by Michael Sandel transcends the limits of law, life and ontology
itself, these are the arguments that justify the death of an innocent, violence and finally war, while the argument of a simple spectator who remembers that someone will die and can be a donor of organs freely and through a natural death.
Belonging can also be an argument for both the death of an innocent and the refusal of it, there are many cases in a war where, for some reason, someone who could kill an “enemy” in some unusual situation refuses to do so.
The aspect of the social contract where the state has a “monopoly” on violence, so it is fair to kill in defense of society, it is even fair to use cruelty (such as torture, for example) to obtain information and fight “evil” of the opposing group is also questionable.
The fact that we have not abandoned such methods and principles is the most serious testimony of the small advance that socially we still walk in the civilizing process, the fact that we are returning little by little to the serious periods of the Cold War indicates that we are still in a waiting period.
How many innocent people and civilians have little or nothing to support certain wars, like the Russian girl who made an innocent drawing about the war, shows that alongside the perversity of imperial struggles and colonizing processes, they are far from having been banished from civilization.
But what does the death of an innocent person mean, what is the ontological and theological meaning of this symbol, the lamb that Abram sacrificed in place of the son who would be sacrificed, let us remember that there are three great Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the that means
It is certainly far from the logic of law, far from rational logic, it means that only innocence and pacifism can contribute to a true civilizing process that dignifies man.
The Easter week that begins next Sunday, although it is a Christian feast, can and should lead humanity to reflect on the true passion for civilization, which, despite all the human suffering caused by wars and injustices, can dream of a new civilization.
Contractualism and Innocence
30
Mar
The great discussion of the contractualists was about the non-innocence of the person, they are
all defenders of the powers of the state and, ultimately, of in dubio pro societate (when in doubt, in favor of society and not of the defendant), Hobbes saw man as evil and the state should police it, Locke saw how it limited the powers of the state and gave the people the right to rebellion and Rousseau saw man as good, society is what corrupted him.
None of them denies the need and priority of state powers, as they were pillars of all modern country constitutions, and their update is in John Rawls and his successor Michael Sandel.
Both were Kantian idealists and utilitarians, but there is a small difference in that Sandel criticized Rawls’s voluntarism, according to which political and moral principles are legitimized from the exercise of individual will through choice or consent.
Locke’s empiricism claimed for this: “we are all, by nature, free, equal and independent, no one can be excluded from this situation and subjected to the political power of others without having given his consent” (1988, section 95).
In order to understand Sandel’s position, it is necessary to read at least the work that we indicate or clearly understand his examples, which seek to make his concepts practical and clear, in relation to belonging to groups, as a guarantee of collective interests (he rejects the term communitarianism). cites two cases: that of a French resistance pilot who during World War II refused to bomb his hometown, even though he knew that this would contribute to the liberation of France (2012, p. 279), belonging to his hometown.
The second example is that of a rescue operation organized by the government of Israel to save Ethiopian Jews from refugee camps in Sudan (2012, p. 280), belonging to the Jewish people.
However, in one of his famous lectures in which he gives other examples, and makes several dialogues with the audience, he is caught in contradiction when he gives the example of 6 patients arriving at an emergency room and 1 is in serious condition while the 5 patients who need donation of different organs to survive and the patient in serious condition requires a lot of care time, asks the question if he would let him die to help others.
Most people agreed to let him die, but a young man (in the photo) said he had another solution, out of the 5 who were about to die, the one who died first would donate his organs to the others, which left Sandel embarrassed and arrived at admit: “it’s a good idea, except for the fact that it destroyed the philosophical point of view” (see video below).
There are interpersonal and ontological relationships that go beyond mere subjectivity, it is something between beings and not just between beings and their cultures or belongings, it is in a kind of collective soul, in a noosphere where everything is more than logical, it is onto-logical.
(155) Justiça com Michael Sandel O Lado Moral do Assassinato – YouTube
LOCKE, J. (1690). “Second Treatise of Government”. In: Two Treatises of Cambridge Government: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
SANDEL, M. (2012) “Justice – what is to do the right thing”. Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian Civilization.
