Arquivo para a ‘Linguagens’ Categoria
The proximity in Ricoeur and Pope Francis
23
Mar
Paul Ricoeur’s quote in the papal encyclical Fratelli Tutti is of a
philosophical and theological dimension that few still understood, by separating partners from close ones, inspired by Ricoeur’s categories, the pope dialogues with contemporaneity both with philosophy and with theology and opens a new path for concrete fraternalism.
Although the tendency of Utopian content that the word Fraternity (the name of the encyclical is Fratelli, remember) takes on a new dimension when reading Socius et Prochain de Ricoeur.
It can be said that it develops a true culture of proximity, that is, it is not the friends of that group that I am connected with, of those who share a certain “identity”, the encyclical also clarifies these false concepts of identity that isolate us from others.
Ricoeur’s mention deserves note: “charity brings together the two dimensions – the mythical and the institutional – as it implies an effective way of transforming history that requires incorporating everything: institutions, law, technique, experience, professional contributions, analysis scientific, administrative procedures ”(FT §164), and thus incorporates human realities in the mythical.
It can be said that it is a realistic realism of a utopia of a better possible world, which cannot be reduced to an ineffective religious sentimentality that threatens certain conceptions that both mystique and good philosophy contemplate, going against the Other, proximity .
Another essential point of the encyclical is the misuse of the identity category, the Encyclical will say that “when they cling to an identity that separates them from others” and it is in Chapter III that speaks precisely of thinking
And the Encyclical alerts: “There are peripheries that are close to us, in the center of a city or in the family itself”. (FT §97), and again in Paul Ricoeur we find: “the neighbor is the very conduct of being present (…) the neighbor’s science is immediately blocked by a neighbor’s praxis: we do not have a neighbor; I am the next someone’s neighbor “(Ricoeur, 1968).
It is the misunderstanding of this category that leads bad philosophy to not understand what the other means and to give and this can be seen in the whole history of philosophy in the different conceptions of identity, the concept is in Stuart Hall and also Heidegger’s that identity is the degree of understanding that each one has of their own culture, but the topic is controversial and we will return to it.
Ricoeur, Paul “O socius e o próximo”, in História e Verdade, trad. F. A. Ribeiro (Companhia Editora Forense: Rio de Janeiro, 1968),
Pope Francis. (2020) Carta Encíclica Fratelli Tutti (FT), Vatican. Available in:
Fratelli tutti (3 October 2020) | Francis (vatican.va)
Good news, bad and post-pandemic trauma
01
Mar
The good news is that the pandemic is decreasing worldwide, the
bad thing is that in Brazil at least 7 states with a worse worsening than the data from 2020, it is worrying, but what is already beginning to be thought is what will come next, our worldview has changed and we need to take a new path.
These are events that happen individually when we have a serious accident, a rupture in personal relationships, or something that creates trauma, according to David Trickey, a psychiatrist and member of the UK Trauma Council, the trauma rupture is a “construction of meaning” .
The psychiatrist explains: “the way you see yourself, the way you see the world and the way you see other people” are shaken by the turn of an event, a gap in your “guidance system” and a simple everyday stress turns into trauma if they are mediated by strong and prolonged feelings of helplessness and apprehension.
It will be necessary to look at people’s mental health, to extend our limit of tolerance and attention, it is at this moment that intolerances and practices of latent or simply little pessimism
What is this guidance and meaning system about, we all have a kind of “personal GPS”, connected to work, human fulfillment and their needs, in short self-esteem and the relationship with others, we dealt with the subject in the past week.
Mental resilience is a kind of balm that moves our cognitive machine and makes us move on from stress and if it gets close to exhaustion it creates a psychic trauma, as serious as a physical trauma.
Remembering the lessons of this pandemic crisis and building new meanings is more difficult than just being “optimistic”, but the penultimate great epidemic of the Spanish crisis has shown that it has been forgotten and the lessons we could learn have not been learned.
Martin Bayly, a social scientist at the London School of Economics (LSE), quoted in a BBC report, went to revisit files on Spanish flu in the UK where 250,000 people died, and could not find any evidence of public homage, he said in the report “The absence of memorials made it disappear from public memory, when writing history”.
This affects our preparedness for future crises, when the 1957 pandemic occurred (the Asian flu killed one million people), several analysts pointed out, according to Bayly’s report, “we completely failed to learn the lessons of 1918”, but also the moral lesson why we were in the middle of war.
Creating a meaning from a social narrative would be an important step, highlights the report, and one of the efforts in the United Kingdom will be to remember the NHS (National Health Service) in the Brazilian case the SUS (Unified Health System), in addition to this thinking about memories and other ways of remembering and recounting this crisis will be alert and preparation for the future.
Naming elephant and worldview
25
Feb
Deceased in February last year, American and
Christian philosopher James W. Sire (1933-2018) did extensive research behind the worldview issue, said it took 30 years, published in 2004, probably to begin to address the theme in 1974.
Also his worldview must be reread, I mean that from 1974 to 2004 the world underwent transformations that it deepened, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the cold war that now seems to be reborn, the fall of dictatorships that seem to come back in all over the planet.
I have not read the book, but one of the book’s chapters and also its commentators have helped formulate an idea, though inaccurate, of his main book Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept, publisher IVP Academic), and the chapter I refer to is the Definitions of Worldview: from Dilthey to Naugle, which in the title is suggestive of some idealism which the text confirms early on, is available on google Books, if he citing Dilthey its good news for me, and it is good text.
It says at the beginning of Chapter 2 that the origin of the term Weltanschauung originated with Kant (1724-1804) (amaze idealists!), “but only in passing” and quotes Dilthey verbatim: “to denote a set of beliefs that underlie and shape all human thought and action.” (Sire, 2004, p. 23), denoting a set of beliefs that underpin and shape all human thought and action.
Although appropriate, perhaps the most thorough analysis of the term, Heidegger’s reading which updated and developed the subject in a broader sense than that of Kant and Dilthey is lacking, and Hans Georg Gadamer will rightly criticize Dilthey’s conception of the idealist.
To follow the concept of Weltanschauung Cites Nietszche, Wittgenstein, with tours of Plato and Descartes, Foucault and passing Rorthy art, and then begins to address evangelical Christian authors (Reformed is the name abroad), James Orr, Abraham Kuyper , Herman Dooyeweerd, Ronald Nash until he comes to what he calls the new synthesis that would be David Naugle.
However, never runs away from idealism, says he goes from ontology to hermeneutics (not the other way around) and says that this synthetic view is characterized by a “system”. semiotic of narrative signs ”(Sire, 2004, p. 42) quoting Naugle who made such a synthesis. However, the true synthesis hidden behind the text, with a clear nominalist view and the idea of a semiotic system, reveals itself by quoting the biblical text: “Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe me also, referring to the biblical passage in John 14: 1, because you then ignore the text that says, “In my father’s house are many mansions.”
The idea of signs, myths and symbols embedded in narratives that represent a worldview is not negligible, and it is even important, however any view that is solely about narrative does not do the work of removing the anthropological view and the real “historical view”. Of what happened, being the idealist and unreal vision of Dilthey’s historicism.
There is another more significant passage, the so-called return of the prodigal son (Luke 15:10: 32), which some idealistic authors and exegetes dislike the name, seeking to idolize the eldest son who stayed at home with his father, who is more conservative. therefore, but also his prodigal son, his defect, went to the world to experiment.
The fact that he returned is commendable, but what a worldview he brought from his deviance, in fact their father is merciful to his conservative and rebel.
Existence, repetition and Being
09
Feb
In philosophy you can have form (morphé) and matter (hilé) and all beings have morphé-form and hilé-matter, but in-formation depends on thinking, it depends on the availability to the act of thinking and not just the repetition, here we find this second topic, that repeating does not just mean becoming redundant, the civilizing problem remains if we do not move forward.
In a lecture in 2016, at the UFRGS Hall of Acts (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) Sloterdijk already sentenced: “I think the reality today is similar to how we were in 1915 – he commented, comparing the current panorama with a time in the last century when the First World War had just started and had not happened… ”, this situation only worsened, the pandemic could be a pause, but it was not..
Access to human existence in a new kind of record implies an articulation of meaning for Being and life, the path taken from Husserl to Heidegger, and then with Gadamer is what links hermeneutics to ontology, and in Gadamer the text is explicit. hermeneutic circle method.
It can be thus described by following Gadamer’s reasoning: it must not be degraded to a vicious circle, even if it is tolerated, in it it holds a positive possibility of originating knowledge, which, of course, will only be properly understood when interpretation understands its task first.
This constant first and last task remains that of not receiving beforehand, through a “happy idea” or through popular concepts, neither the previous position nor the previous vision, but in securing the scientific theme in the elaboration of these concepts. from the same thing. (GADAMER, 1998, p. 401).
Considering the method we return to the essential question of Being, which is the forgetting in Western philosophy of this concept from Plato to Nietzsche, and thus we have a metaphysics or its negation, both incompletely because such an essential concept has not been addressed.
It is the forgetting of being, which the philosopher diagnoses throughout the Western philosophical tradition, beginning with Plato and extending to Nietzsche. In his work “What is metaphysical” (written in 1929), Heidegger defines existence as follows: “The word existence means a way of being and, undoubtedly, of the being of that being that is open to the opening of being, in which lies while sustaining it.” (HEIDEGGER,1989, p.59).
Without this essential category discussion and thought are tied to the “being,” which Thomas Aquinas defines it thus: “From which it follows that the essence, by which a thing is called the ‘being,’ is not only form, nor only matter, but both, although in its own way only form is the cause of this being ”(Aquino, 2008, pp 10), in this ontological line there is no separation between Ent and Being, even in English the words can be the same (Being).
Thus we have beyond Being, its aggregate category of being, which is inseparable from it essential concept.
AQUINO, T. O Ente e a Essência, Universidade da Beira Interior. LusoSofia.Press, Covilhã, PT, 2008.
HEIDEGGER, Martin. Que é metafísica? In: HEIDEGGER, Martin. Conferências e escritos filosóficos. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1989.
GADAMER, H.G. Verdade e Método: Traços fundamentais de uma hermenêutica filosófica. Tradução de Flávio Paulo Meurer. 2. ed. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1998.
Living metaphor and idea
29
Jan
The hermeneutics developed in “Metaphor alive” is an advanced
pole of phenomenology seen as a method of interpretation necessary to the life of thought, which has its own level of discourse, refounding the eidos that came from the Greeks, giving it what was called “Ideology of the ineffable”, not of the unreachable in thought, but what is put on conscience and not said.
The living metaphor begins where linguistics ends, it is thus a fusion between both and almost a complement, it is not just because there is no linguistic current that allows it, if we understand that meaning is a central problem for linguistics this overcoming of the living metaphor it is better understood as the possibility of multiple interpretations by the interpreter.
The Greeks’ definition of metaphor, in Aristotle’s poetic and rhetorical studies, metaphor is seen from the semantic interpretation, where the word or the name are basic units between the poetics and rhetoric, where while the second is turned to mimesis or art of imitating human actions (it is a reductionism to see metaphor just like this), the second is the art of persuading, where it is possible to perceive that a beautiful speech is more convincing than a logical and clear speech.
Ricoeur’s great contribution will be based on the semantics of the isolated word, linked to the substitution theory and the linguistic notion of what “code” is, a semantics of discourse understood as totality, he considers that the act of speech in the philosophical-speculative sense is different from other discursive acts, such as poetic, religious and even scientific, where the Greek origin is that which predisposes the notion of “being” to its philosophical vocation, it can go from an ontoteology to a new ontology based on dynamics of the meaning of “say-how” which is an ontology implicit in the metaphorical statement, in it the “being-like” means “to be and not to be”, the new ontology.
The living metaphor is not as complex as its explanation, it means that it is possible from the metaphor to give meaning to the “ineffable” even as a metaphor, by the “life” inserted in it.
Parables are close to metaphors, because both want to explain complex truths.
The use of parables in the Bible in lessons that Jesus tried to explain to simpler people complex things, is thus similar to that of the living metaphor, explaining what is the word sown among people who wanted to know the divine, the parable of the sower is used, the seed sown in good soil, in the midst of thorns, in rocky ground and little fertile soil (Mc 4,26-34). (in pincture The sower de Van Gogh).
There are no biblical determinisms, as being all soils are possible, what happens if a soil is better or worse for a seed depends on how it falls in the understanding of each person, thus subject to interpretation.
References:
Bible. Apostle Marcos.
RICOEUR, Paul. Living Metaphor.
For a spiritual ascesis
14
Jan
What we see beyond the crisis and cultural night,
beyond a deep social crisis without a thought that catalyses the real forces of society that point to the future, is also a night of God, educator Martin Buber describes it as God’s Eclipse.
Buber wrote in his book: “I later built for myself the meaning of the word ‘mismatch’, through which was roughly described the failure of a true encounter between human beings. When, after another 20 years, I saw my mother, who had come to visit me, my wife, and my children from afar, I couldn’t look into her still astonishingly beautiful eyes without hearing the word “mismatch” somewhere as if it were. tell me.
I suppose that everything I have experienced over the course of my life about the authentic encounter has its first origin at that time in the gallery. ”(BUBER, 1991, p. 8). Thus revealing the true face of the “silence of God” of Judaism in which it has its roots, will be in another book the “I-Thou” where he will reveal an aspect of his asceticism which is “the encounter with the Other”, which for Buber more. than one person, your Tu has a divine essence, God inhabits the other.
These days there are two strong tendencies, and in both asceses there is in fact no spirituality beyond transcendence, or the activism that Byung Chul condemns as the “active vita” that leads to tiredness, or the idealistic subjectivism that can It seems to be religion but it is not, what it arouses is nothing but sentimentality, and can lead to “faithful” tears, not necessarily to God, if they do discover Him they must seek another true asceticism.
Thus it is possible that they will find God in one way or another, but there is no other way to remain in the faith, not of the blind but of those who have found a clearing, if indeed meditation and prayer are to remain, they are indispensable.
For those who have no faith, a good reading, separating passages and thoughts, living the moment as we wrote in the previous post, is fundamental, that is, also for reading can follow the rule of doing it without “gluttony”, try put the soul in silence, making a true “epoché”.
To those who believe always reflect that Jesus prayed, and asked his disciples to pray with him, and not to lose this practice, Jesus will tell the parable of the bad judge who does not want to attend the widow, but by his insistence and so that she does not. he curses, he answers, says the opening passage: “Jesus told the disciples a parable to show them the need to pray always, and never give up…”, which is in Luke 18: 1.
BUBER, Martin. (1995) Eclipse de Dios. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995.
Anguish, existence and vanity
12
Jan
As we have already discussed, the anguish of our 
time is the tension with Being, maintaining “authenticity with oneself”, not being carried away by the current of expectations and impositions of temporal powers, and thus dealing with the frustrations of holding firm perennial values and dealing with oneself. with the transients.
From this stems the search for an existence where there is Fortune (our happiness), but the Greeks who used reference to the goddess Fortuna (picture), knew well that it was not related to the possession of goods, as stated Heraclitus of Ephesus: “if the If happiness were in the pleasures of the body, we would say happy oxen when they find peas to eat”, some prefer peas.
When we do not live the repetition as expounded by Professor Giacóia in the sense of seeking the essence, we enter the repetition of sameness that lives from fear, which leads us to live in impropriety, we do not attribute meaning (or meaning some prefer), we let others and circumstances attribute it, we live the worst alienation, the alienation of ourselves, running everywhere with full and empty agendas at the same time, frivolities said Sloterdik.
We live for a purpose that has no end, in the sense of goal, but “borrowed” meanings of daily life, conjunctures and contexts. Anguish produces the opposite effect. It opens up the possibility of finding what I am within a proper sense of life.
It is the reunion with the Self, open to the world and the Other, without implying either individual closure or depersonalization of the environment, today with the strong pressure of psychopower, as thinker Byung Chul Han defines the essential pressure of this time.
What we seek, what is our goal, should ultimately be seen as end, never as temporal: money, power, wealth or simply some vanity.
Possible pax
05
Dec
It is not social, political or ethical peace that is
always in conflict, although there are integrative movements and a worldwide tendency towards global citizenship, living in the village (with communications is global) and feeling a citizen of the world.
The next generation will be able to accomplish this, the “mature” generation now has setbacks in reading the present, and this has caused fear and distrust by breaking feelings of respect and otherness.
The measures of force are discouraging and reprocessing of the social process, moving towards autocracies and arbitrariness, they are never democratic.
The pax roman was submission to the central power of Rome, the peace of Westphalia was a treaty of religious tolerance among Christians and eternal peace the idealistic dream in the power of the modern state.
Possible peace is tolerance of differences and acceptance of human limits in times of crisis, depends on some dose of the spiritual.
Deserts and the oracles
04
Dec
We walk like somnambulists in the dark, points out Edgar Morin, this
is not a favorable time for thinking, says Peter Sloterdijk, Byung Chul Han says that our time is the “desert or hell of the same”, but I would say that the desert can still be fertile, and having an Oasis, however sterile, is mass, depersonalizing and more than authoritarian, it identifies us to nothing.
These are some of the voices that I identify as a desperate search for a return not to the old normal, but to a really new normal, it must not be this at the end of the pandemic, but the hell that leveled us all below, for the inhuman, the irrational and cynicism.
Edgar Morin points to education as a path to this renewal, but who will be teachers with new thinking and new mentality, Byung Chul Han points to the care of the land, his new book “Praise of the Earth” that points to a community garden, where the rhythms and characteristics of each flower are registered and received with their oriental attention, centered on the simple elements of each flower.
Peter Sloterdijk had already written if Europe Awakened, we could say now if the world woke up in the post-pandemic, if we really looked at the Moral Good that Morin proposes, for a concrete and truly universal fraternity offered by Father Francisco in his encyclical Fratelli Tutti but I think they are voices that cry out in the desert like John the Baptist who died beheaded by the request of a sensual dancer who had enchanted Herod.
When the Pharisees went to John the Baptist, who lived in the wilderness, wearing camel skins and eating bee honey and cereals, he replied (John 1:23): “I am the voice of the one who cries out in the wilderness, ‘Make a straight path to the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said.”
When there are oracles, thinkers, and scholars who speak in the wilderness a change is near.
The eschatological infinity
26
Nov
Transcendence as an idea of the Infinite can be understood in
Lévinas’ philosophy as “The presence of a being that does not enter the sphere of the Same, a presence that exceeds it, fixes its’ status” of infinity, this is how the idea will appear in Lévinas of Foreigner and there he in his own eschatology.
The term Foreigner is typical of the biblical tradition from which Emmanuel Lévinas feeds, as many feed on Greek mythology, it is present in the fourfold prophet Isaiah, a prophet as in the mode of the celebrated Greek poets Homer and Hesiod, is curious because it can if Lévinas’s part sees a convergence between Hellenic and Semitic culture, contrary to all fury against Judeo-Christian culture.
The quadratics are as follows: the poor (who have no economic resources), the widow (who has no husband to support her), the orphan (who has no shelter to collect him), the foreigner (who has no country to step on) . they are the synthesis of what we now call and excluded in biblical times, and we can see in a new “philosophical” eschatology by Lévinas the idea of an eschatological “end” not as the end of time, but the end of poverty, of female helplessness (today more serious is femicide), the organs of wars and foreigners who walk around the world and which Bauman comes to irony (amazement) and then a new apocalypse.
It is thus that the infinite and the being-for-death can also have an eschatological interpretation, without any prejudice or presumption to the religious sense that may at some point occur, and from which the planet is not exempt, after all an eschatological end present in many non-Christian religions is what the earth itself (the mother-earth) rebels against, again a convergence with biblical prophecies.
The big reason why this idea was almost abolished in modernity, Leibniz already claimed it, is said by Lévinas: “My life and history do not form totality. The common that allows us to speak of objectified society, and by which man resembles the thing and individualizes himself as a thing, is not first ”(in Ethics and Infinite), and Lévinas will define this process as“ infinity ”(perhaps a better translation would be infinitation, but they did not translate this way), an inversion of modern subjectivity, because the subject is subjecting himself to Other, and thus lives his personal “in process” eschatology, subject to the Infinite.
On the social scale it is the foreigner, the poor and the one who suffers some kind of prejudice (the racist, for example, but there are others including the religious) and with this we are heading towards an authentic eschatological end, an apocalypse of the current world without brake and without a safe direction for all humanity.
