Arquivo para a ‘Linguagens’ Categoria
Anthropotechnics and the two forms of domination
30
Jun
If there is a close relationship between Sloterdijk’s thought
and Heidegger and some parallel with the thought of Hans Georg Gadamer, the link between German thought and names such as Ernst Cassieer, Max Scheler, Arnold Gehler and Hellmuth Plessner leads us both to a philosophical anthropology and to the returns to an almost forgotten perspective of the “sciences of the spirit”.
Of these authors, some very close to the Nazi projects, he takes advantage of the idea of man as a deficient being, who does not have natural means (claws, teeth or horns, for example) to defend himself and must seek in artificial means, but does not differentiate them from “spiritual” means
It is not by chance that his work draws parallels with Nietzsche’s “Dead God”, the criticism of Heidegger’s humanism, but his work seeks an original anthropogenesis, and his anthropotechnics are inserted in it, especially what is written in “You have to change your life. ” where he differentiates two forms of artificial production of human behavior that have flourished since antiquity in the so-called “high cultures”, undergoing a profound transformation in modernity, the first is the production of some men by other men, which he calls techniques of “leaving -se operate”, while the second is the production of men from themselves, which would then be the “autos” – the techniques of Operation” (Sloterdijk, 2009).
On these two types of anthropotechnics, he proposes to rethink, on a basis of philosophical anthropology, the Foucauldian concepts of “biopolitics” and “aesthetics of existence”, with similar ideas in these two poles, the domestication of the other, hence his idea of the human park, and self-colonization, which his disciple Byung-Chul Han will call self-exploitation.
Sloterdijk’s basic difference is the idea of ”Improvement of the world” (Weltverbesserung) based on the improvement of populations that dominates Western theory since Plato is exchanged for a “improvement of the self” (Selbsverbesserung) and does so with the “technologies of the self”, and for this men do it as a “society of exercises”.
For Byung-Chul Han, these exercises are controlled by technologies of the “self” that each time refer to psychological exercises, and so he calls it “psychopolitics”, since they believe that it is self-realization that transforms their lives, although they practice a “self-exploitation”.
Both Foucault, Sloterdijk and Byung Chul Han, and this is at the origin of Nietzsche’s thought, that the emergence of ascetic practices provoked an anthropogenesis that divided humans into two categories: the virtuous and the non-virtuous, while in the exercise society, there is an unskilled asceticism.
É Chul Han draws attention to the categories of active life and contemplative life, based on the thoughts of Hannah Arendt and Saint Gregory of Nazianzo (or Nazianzen), Sloterdijk is stuck in his criticism of Scheler, who sees only the person as “ something” besides his acts, and in this he sees a “spirit”.
SLOTERDIJK, P. (2018) Tens de mudar sua vida. Lisboa: Relógio d´Água.
Being, clearing and humanism
29
Jun
In the context in which Heidegger wrote Being and Time,
it is what remains hidden within a whole, where being should emerge, this is appropriate to the discourse of modernity where there is a reduction to human material life, and a division between what it is subjective and objective in Being.
This fragmentation emerges only in one part, most of the time it is opposite to the entity to which the being belongs, explaining in a different way, making a joke: “the being of the entity”.
Being and being are intertwined, being is conditioned by being, since it has a broader sense, this broader definition Heidegger defined as Dasein, or being-there to say this fact that there is a cosmovision of being in relation to a context broader scope of your experience.
However, far from a solution to the paradox of modernity, what Heidegger called the manifestation of being through language, including poetics as one of the functions of language, making there an abode of being, which would preserve the ex-tactician naming in the clearing.
The clearing would be nothing more than the truth of being, that is, it would remove us from the abyss of our ex-sistent essence, and the clearing would give us back the “world” and language is the advent that reveals and clears up being itself, but Sloterdijk responding to its clearing in Heidegger’s Letters for Humanism, he makes an answer in the book Rules for the Human Park, saying of the failure of this clearing and of humanism.
This clearing is neither the habitat nor the environment, and this one finds itself in rupture with nature, where it identifies the failure of the human being as a shepherd of the being, whose essence would not be to take care of the sick, but to keep his flock in the clearing, the clearing is the open world and, in this case, the task is used in the being freely chosen and impregnating itself with the being itself.
Before advancing in the criticism, it is necessary to emphasize Sloterdijk’s praise of Heidegger, there is a praise of his criticism of Humanism, reconceptualizing it and seeking the essence of man in this system.
Sloterdijk’s starting point is Heidegger’s critique, where he seeks a better understanding of what man is within this humanism, and a greater understanding of the clearing.
Subjectivity is no longer a mere grammatical fundamental and becomes a foundation as a human representation, whether of its feelings or its essence, and of man in this system.
Sloterdijk’s starting point is Heidegger’s critique, where he seeks a better understanding of what man is within this humanism, and a greater understanding of the clearing.
Subjectivity is no longer a mere grammatical fundamental and becomes a foundation as a human representation, whether of its feelings or its essence, and thus the foundation becomes the self, thus modernity opens an object-subject relationship.
Everything, then, is for man, it is anthropocentric and the world opens up to domination, for science and technique to dominate it, grounding all knowledge, but what is the knowledge about Being.
By exchanging this vocabulary from humanism to his own (subjectivity) Heidegger states, according to Sloterdijk, that the school of domestication of man, which is really a school, the pedagogical project initiated by the Romans, is a failed school, domestication was not possible.
Two of Sloterdijk’s successes are an astonishment for the future of civilization, first a positive necessity that is co-immunity, the idea that only a joint defense of the Being overcomes the self, the other dangerous is that the domestication project has failed and the clearing is an imperative, not just a humanist narrative.
Sloterdijk says textually: “the history of the clearing cannot be developed only as a narrative of the arrival of human beings to the houses of languages” and from there he elaborates his anthropotechnics, will be our next topic.
SLOTERDIJK, P. (2000) Regras para o parque humano. (in portuguese) Trad. José Oscar de Almeida Marques, Brazil, São Paulo: Estação Liberdade.
The path and being
23
Jun
Even if I have read Heidegger, few have read at least in its
entirety O ser e o tempo, or another work that I consider important The origin of the work of art, and the most controversial (at least currently) that is Letters on Humanism, not only because Sloterdijk rejected it, but because thinking about what humanism is today is the most important task in trying to save civilization.
Just look around, from the pandemic to war, the extreme and sometimes irrational political politicization, and not only all of this, but especially the sharp look and thinking that saw beyond appearances.
There are two good biographies of Heidegger, one by Hugo Ott, which I read in pieces and another that I read and passed on to so many friends, which is Rudiger Safranski’s, both deserve to be read and are not Heidegger.
On the way through the forest, the time that Heidegger spent around the fire, where he smoked his pipe with the peasants and woodsmen of the Black Forest, it is said that in silence, perhaps it says more about Heidegger than his philosophy, says something of the poetry he did not write. , but lived.
It was there in an interview that Heidegger gave to Der Spiegel that he said (not in a religious tone but in a tone of disbelief) he said the phrase: “Only a God can save us”, and he was right.
The rustic and simple hut that Heidegger inhabited during the time he wrote Being and Time, was also his refuge in the time of the Forest Path, and of a short little-known writing that “Creative Landscape: why we perpass in the province”, that it is not a compliment to the province, but the need for a contemplation that urban life had lost, a path similar to the one that a younger philosopher Byung-Chul Han wrote in The Society of Fatigue.
It is written in “Creative Landscape”: “The city dweller thinks he “mingles with the people” as soon as he deigns to have a long conversation with a peasant. At night, on a break from work, when I sit by the fire with the peasants, or at the table in the Herrgott swinkel, then most of the time we don’t say anything. We smoke our pipes in silence”, the note clarifies that Herrgottswinkel is an establishment in the countryside.
So it’s not isolation or provincialism, but a pause to get back on track.
HEIDEGGER, M. (2014) Paisagem Criativa: Por que permanecemos na província , in: Idéia. Campinas (SP)|n. 9.
Path and method
22
Jun
Every path requires a path, a path traced and directed to a 
scientific object is a method, there are more complex definitions, but in general they are already linked to a methodology.
A widely used definition is “scientific method refers to an agglomeration of ground rules of procedures that produce scientific knowledge, whether new knowledge or a correction or an increase in the given area”.
This type of general rule can fall either into logical positivism, a determinism about the sciences, or into an empiricist reductionism that sees the object under certain parameters.
Both Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn would argue against this view of method, Popper sees it as provisional knowledge, with successive falsifications, whereas Thomas Kuhn elaborated the idea of changing paradigms that he calls scientific revolutions, either by one or the other science must have theories that evolve over time.
Just as the path itself can lead to falsifications or new discoveries, we prefer the term path, but in order not to fall into sophistry (theories that deny an episteme) it is necessary both to focus on the investigated object and to be open to the new, as in philosophy not it must begin with a hypothesis, but with a question that one seeks to resolve.
Looking at an object imagining something similar to the Other helps, but it does not solve the problem, it is necessary to investigate its variants and its pitfalls, in short, always questioning.
Both ontology and phenomenology, both are philosophically interconnected, and both admit metaphysics, have this reference in relation to the method and its object, as well as reject any methodological and theoretical dogmatism about the investigated object.
Also the historical path is not deterministic, in this respect Hans Georg Gadamer wrote questioning Wilhem Dilthey’s romantic historicism and retracing Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle, thus changing Dilthey’s methodological hermeneutics to which hermeneutics leads the interpretation of cultural changes within a historical context,
Both Gadamer, Antony Giddens and Boaventura de Souza Santos are concerned theorists concerned with developing a methodological approach to verify the fundamental conditions under which paradigm shifts occur.
For this, one must observe the “path”, understand the path and be open to a new horizon.
References:
GADAMER, H-G. (1998) Verdade e método: traços fundamentais de uma hermenêutica filosófica. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, Brazil.
GIDDENS, Anthony. (1984) Structuration theory, empirical research and social critique. In: _____. The constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
SANTOS, Boaventura de Souza. (1989) Introdução a uma Ciência Pós-Moderna. Rio de Janeiro: Graal.
Being and the Imperishable
17
Jun
It was Justin Saint and Christian Martyr of the second century, who,
meeting an Elder, who is in his book Dialogue with Trypho, he understood that it was God’s desire that the soul be immortal and this separated it from Platonism, a philosophical path that had traveled after the Stoics.
Justin is the first in Christianity to deal with the problems of philosophy in a contemplative and philosophical way, his work was not systematic (Apology I and II), but fundamental to a philosophical path of Christian thought, and influenced many thinkers of patristics of early Christian times. .
For his Christian faith, Justin was denounced and beheaded.
Thus, something imperishable inhabits the Being and is essential to it, the simple contemplation and asceticism that does not contain this premise is incomplete, however the access to this truth depends on a stage of beatitudes, those that are in Matthew 5, I highlight 4 that are contextually (Mt 5,5-9): Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be filled, Blessed are the merciful, for they will obtain mercy, Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God, Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
But all this is not imperative to reach an immediate access to the divine, eternity is timeless and in it time is differentiated, it is a Kairos, or a time on the divine clock.
And all this is not separate from everyday life, which contains an “Scent of Time” as proposed Byung Chul Han, a divine humanly lived in each action and thus is not separate from contemplation, but has a different cadence from pure and simple activism.
Christian following is deeper because it requires renunciation, it is not enough to find Jesus or the Divine, in Lk 9:23, the master himself taught: “Then Jesus said to everyone: “If anyone wants to follow me, let him deny himself and take your cross each day, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it.”
And this is the hardest and most definitive lesson.
Being and Contemplation
16
Jun
The thinker Byung-Chul Han developed the themes of Hannah
Arendt Vita Activa and Vita Contemplativa in his book “A society of Bournout”, where he reveals that “the loss of the contemplative capacity is in correspondence with the absolutization of the vita activa – which measure to the hysteria and nervousness of the modern society of action”, and this leads to tiredness, depression, self-exploitation and Burnout.
According to the Korean-German thinker, current life has led to the “imperative of work, which degrades the person into animal laborans”, which makes him lose the “world” and “time”. new “the contemplative vita in your bosom” and “put yourself at your service again” (O Aroma do tempo. A philosophical essay on the art of delay, 2009).
Despite this loss, there is a renewed interest in spirituality in Western civilization, but it does not consider traditional religions more important, which occurs in the sphere of a phenomenon called “mindfulness”, linked to neurosciences and in health care, education and business.
There is no deeper meaning in this relationship that reaches the divine, the superhuman or the beyond-human, it turns to what Peter Sloterdijk calls “the exercise society”, without the possibility of a true spirituality, or a despiritualized asceticism.
Hannah Arendt had touched on the problem lightly, it must be remembered that her thesis was on “Love in St. Augustin” without the help of the divine it does so without success, it remains hidden.
“With the title Vita contemplativa, that world in which it was originally located should not be reconjured. It is linked to that experience of being, according to which the beautiful and the perfect is Immutable and Imperishable and withdraws from any and all human use” (HAN, p. 35), although for the author the contemplative capacity is not necessarily linked to the imperishable Being (p. 36).
The concept of what the soul is was treated by Saint Justin, in the second century of the Christian era, before becoming a Christian he had approached the Stoics, but they did not consider it important to know God, then he approached the Pythagoreans and had to dedicate himself to numbers and music, and finally it was Plato’s disciples who thought as much about corporeal things as about ideas, but the key problem that distanced him was the question of the “soul” and is in his “Dialogue with Trypho”.
For older Christians (Catholic, Orthodox and Eastern) Eucharistic Adoration is the greatest contemplation, because God makes himself a piece of bread, a consecrated host.
Han, Byung-Chul Sociedade do cansaço. tradução de Enio Paulo Giachini. – Petropolis, RJ: Vozes, 2015.
Being, clearing and unveiling
08
Jun
Every material, human and substantial question developed in the Enlightenment humanism provoked a veiling of Being, in which the external questions are more important and thought out than the interior ones, even though from Kant to Hegel the question of the spirit has been dealt with, it has always resulted in a dualism between active life (exterior) and contemplative life (interior), the latter translated as subjectivity (which belongs to the subject) and the former as objectivity.
For Heidegger it goes further, because it touches on the deep question of truth, it is in it that Western metaphysical thought was decided and developed, for this the thinker took up the question that the Greeks called “aletheia”, commonly translated simply as truth, but the suffix a-léthea, indicates negation, thus unveiled or as Heidegger preferred to translate it: unveiled.
The veiling is linked to the “presence” [on], which is the presence and the light, synthesized in the question that drives Plato’s thought in the myth of the cave, coming to light, coming out of the cave, in times of darkness, it means finding the clearing and unveiling it.
The presence of light, summarized in the question of Eidos, which was translated in the West by the word idea, cannot forget that for the Greeks the big question is to remain in the light, or to get out of the objective/subjective dualism that is to have the light of Being, not only inwardly, but in outward acts.
When questioning the end of philosophy as a task of thought, the act of questioning while thinking becomes pure interpretation of “data”, it is no longer a question of “[on” (presence) but what is present only as a thing, which for Heidegger from phenomenology is an adjective of “light”, while thinking is an “open free”, which has nothing in common, not even from the point of view of language, he wrote in this question: “of course, in the sense of open free , has “nothing” in common, neither from a linguistic point of view, nor in terms of the thing that is expressed with the adjective “luminous”, which means clear” (HEIDEGGER, 1979, p. 79).
It’s not about abolishing tradition, it played a role in history, but unveiling it, bringing it to light.
It is, therefore, about free thinking about the world, in permanent exercise of the world view.
Heidegger, Martin. (1979) “O fim da filosofia e a tarefa do pensamento” (The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thought”. In: Os pensadores. Brazil, São Paulo: Abril Cultural, pp. 79.
The Spirit for the Religion
03
Jun
One of the important features as a starting point in Hegelian
thought is the concept of religion, and in it the final stage of the construction of the subjective thought of idealism, which after moving from the subject to the object, creates an idea of representation in itself and for yes.
We have already said that a guiding thread is the idea of supersumption, which represents the consciousness of the movement of what opposes the object and the need for something of itself and for itself “ideal”, remembering from the previous post that the supersumption is an interaction between thesis and antithesis.
The concept of the self, which goes from the subject to the object and the self that transcends this path, does not contain the “other”, alterity, as thought in Christian ontology:
“The presence of an object is the presence of another, determined as the non-divine being, the finite world, finite consciousness. This finitude of the other is articulated in nature itself or in the spirit in itself, or in consciousness or in the spirit for an other”. (AQUINO, 1989, p.242).
Therefore, the contradiction already presents itself before the question of a divine “spirit”, Holy as Christianity presupposes, is in the consciousness of itself, and the question of the representation of the object.
The for-itself is not a beyond, but a return to the transcendent in-itself, a closure in itself, for this reason it does not contain the other, so the idea of subject is what differentiates from religion, it is the question of Being, a Being that it is Other, and not a for-itself that turns to the in-itself.
Thus, having observed this junction that refers to the presence of an object and another, both establish a relationship with consciousness, but consciousness itself is only interiority while the for-itself admits a beyond, since from the Greek this suffix means this, as parallax (beyond position), paradox (beyond opinion), etc.
In terms of representation, consciousness is in relation both to the world and to another consciousness, they still remain in the world, but a for-itself means beyond the world, beyond sensible and palpable reality, not only in the idea, but as To be.
A spirit thus thought transcends being and being-with-Other, making another-Being, which for many religions is the spiritual world, in which there is a Being par excellence.
The Christian trinitarian relationship is a for-itself-Beyond-Being, or a Being par excellence, therefore a Holy Spirit, which relates to the Being-in-the-World that is consubstantiated with the pure divine Being.
It is then beyond the supersumption, there is no thesis and antithesis, but each Being is in the Other, in the trinitarian reasoning: Jesus is consubstantiated in the Father, generated by the Holy Spirit, who is relationship with the Being.
The Christian Trinitarian relationship is perichoretic, that is, each being “interpenetrates” the other and there is communion.
Jesus reveals this perichoretic relationship to the apostles (Jn 20:21-22(: “Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit”,” the divine reality in the human soul.
AQUINO, M. F. O Conceito de religião em Hegel (The concept of religion in Hegel). Brazil, Sao Paulo: Loyola, 1989.
Ontologic Dualism and Spirit in Hegel
02
Jun
In opposition to the classical ontology Being and Nothingness,
in Hegel they do not exclude each other in absolute affirmation or negation, they are integrated in him within a rational discourse, thus “being” can be totally empty and identifies itself with nothingness, thus its first determination. logic is Becoming.
Following this logic, which comes from Kant and further from Parmenides, Being is and not Being is not, creates the idea of absolute spirit which is identity eternally in itself, which knows by itself, and thus the infinite substance is one and universal, not as particular and finite, being divided by means of judgment in itself, in a knowledge in which it exists such.
For the sophists, knowledge must also be related to pleasures and the good life, the discourse is in Plato’s Philebus, which has the intervention of Socrates that will give meaning to Being.
For both art, religion and philosophy, for Hegel, they have different levels of reality, these correspond to the meanings of nature, spirit and idea, all are manifestations of the absolute spirit.
Just as classical idealism allows for the separation of subject and object, Hegel’s ontological idealism allows absolute spirit taken to the level of religion, which has nothing to do with classical religions, or with dialectical materialism, so the old and new were differentiated. Hegelians.
Religion in Hegel can be characterized as something that starts from the subject belonging to him, the absolute spirit, that is, his subjectivity, says in his work:
“The subjective consciousness of the absolute spirit is essentially, in itself, a process; whose immediate and substantial unity is faith in the witness of the spirit as the certainty of objective truth. Faith, which at the same time contains this immediate unity, this unity insofar as the relationship of those different determinations has passed into devotion, into implicit or explicit worship. For the process of suppressing [aufhebn] in spiritual liberation the opposition of confirming through this mediation that first certainty, and in gaining the concrete determination of that certainty, that is, the reconciliation, the effectiveness of the spirit”. (HEGEL, 1995, p.340).
For those who want a deeper understanding of religion in Hegel, which he called “absolute religion” in reference to absolute spirit, the work Phenomenology of Spirit is indicated.
HEGEL, G.W.F. Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences In: Compendium. Translation in portuguese: Paulo Meneses and José Machado. 2nd ed. Brazil, São Paulo: Vozes, 1995.
* aufheben is used by Hegel to explain what happens when a thesis and antithesis interact, and in this sense it is mostly translated as “suprasumption”.
Spirit and dualistic ontology
01
Jun
Since the thought of Permenides and Heraclitus, Western 
philosophy oscillates between Being and Becoming, without either having a clear answer to the question of the spirit, or we fall into the subjectivism of the Soul that comes from Neoplatonists like Plotinus, who said that only the Soul is One, or we fall into a modern dialectical vision: thesis, synthesis and antithesis, which is the result of Becoming.
Among the authors who tried to break with this dualism is Bergson, who introduces the question of the spirit in his thought, trying to deconstruct the ontology outlined from the 20th century. XVII attacking the old theory of knowledge, which elaborates concepts and properties sustained in the denial of time and in the concept of duration linked to Ser.
Bergson’s thought, roughly speaking, is a traditional metaphysics starting from the pre-Socratics’ options between Being and Becoming, and he chooses substantiality (permanence) and idea (fixity) as pillars of his thought, so “search for the reality of things”. over time, beyond what moves” (Bergson, 1959, p. 1259) (see the cone in picture).
It can be said that the problem in Bergson’s reflection lies in the genetic analysis of representation, and this in turn is linked to the clash of dualism itself in the philosophical tradition, especially the modern one, that is, the critique of the opposition between “realism x idealism”.
After discussing the issue of Memory and Matter, the high point of his philosophy, he falls into the trap of Western thought defining the terms of the problem in terms of “images” (for some authors it would be the middle way between the thing and its perception in the “being”), and in this way, incapable of the excesses of the “material thing”, intends to “spiritual representation”.
Thus the image is a presence in the senses allowing the naive and direct description of the experience (or perception) of matter, it can be said that the new dualism is tied to the meaning of the spiritual representation, and thus one could break with the dualism body and soul (or mind).
The question of representation permeates his thought, so spirit is just a resource for it, in his Essay this is made clear by the division of the chapters: if the first deals with the “Selection” for representation, the second and third will analyze the “recognition” while the fourth will deal with the metaphysical conception of matter, by defining it as totality and extensive continuity (reminiscent of the Cartesian res-extensive) and presents it as a solution to the problem of dualism, the “delimitation and fixation of images”.
So Kant’s transcendence between subject and object is just put another way, so the question of Spirit is just an ingenious ruse, but it doesn’t resolve idealist dualism.
BERGSON, H. (1959) Oeuvres Edition du Centenaire. Paris: PUF.
