Arquivo para a ‘Linguagens’ Categoria
The ineffable and the metaphor
20
Jul
The linguistic turn is one of the hypotheses of interpretation
of post-modernity, not the only one, but something beyond idealistic modernity was already emerging in the crisis of the beginning of the last century: the crisis of thought, of society (two world wars), the cold war and now polarization.
We have already posted about the link between metaphor and the ineffable in Paul Ricoeur and for him metaphor is a reagent (réactif) that reveals the symbolic in language, which leads us to think because of its excess of meaning and thus is a way of understanding available to the hermeneutician.
But there is something beyond the possibility of a hypothesis, how many scientific questions need to resort to metaphor before a final explanation, in John Searle’s work on Expression and Meaning asks an important question about what it means when we say S is P and we mean To be? And that actually the listener between S is P.
His question at heart is to know “how metaphorical emissions work, that is, how is it possible for speakers to communicate something to listeners speaking metaphorically, since they do not say what they mean? And why do some metaphors work and others not? (SEARLE, 2002, p.112).
According to the author, when thinking we should not dispense with different ways of understanding (myth, allegory, metaphor, analogy) and even less different methods to interpret them: exegesis, history, psychoanalysis, anthropology, linguistics and others, in my view, it seems like a principle more the universal because it is not confined in some methodological field and subject to its “vices”.
But the ineffable is an inherent part of the progress of human knowledge, and it means to be beyond the logical and the physical, being in that field whose most appropriate name is the ineffable.
The way in which this understanding can be reached is called the “short track”, and it was based on the hermeneutics proposed by Martin Heidegger, it consists of the way he intends to base his hermeneutics by deviating from what he calls the “short track”, proposed by Martin Heidegger, he consists in not seeking the methods or conditions of understanding, but from the being of man, his Dasein, whose existence consists in understanding, if something is ineffable there is always limitation
Answering Searle’s question, it doesn’t matter if the listener understood exactly S is P or S is R, because if S is P and this was what a source said, the recipient understood it exactly or not, it is due to its existence as a being that understands, your worldview, which may be limited.
Admitting the ineffable, which at a certain moment can only be said metaphorically, analogously or even exegetically, is to admit the coexistence of different worldviews, and this may be more palpable than the understanding of that phenomenon at a certain moment is only possible through metaphor.
Interiority and the social relationship
16
Jul
If today’s society “isolates” the individual, and the pandemic 
has done so in greater depth, this does not mean that some isolation is not necessary in an increasingly hectic urban life.
The cultural drama of our time is when “it presupposes exactly the non-satisfaction (by oppression, repression or some other means) of powerful instincts explained Freud (see the post on Civilization and its Discontents), he exposes this as a “cultural frustration ” that dominates the field of social relationships between human beings, but Byung Chul Hang goes deeper when analyzing what pain is.
Byung-Chul Han’s new book “The Palliative Society” will describe the medieval society as the society of martyrdom in the face of pain, and the current one as the Survival Society, and because of the attempt to avoid pain, as a Palliative Society, so many antidepressants, anxiolytics and “analgesics, prescribed en masse, hide relationships that lead to pain” (Han, 2021, p.29).
In a curious analysis for a Buddhist, but perhaps aware that Easter means a “passage” through pain to eternal life, the author describes: “in view of the pandemic, the survival society even prohibits the Easter Mass. Also priests practically “social distancing” and wear protective masks. They sacrifice faith entirely to survival… Virology espouses theology.” (Han, 2021, p. 35).
Everyone listens to the virologists, says the author, the beautiful narrative of the resurrection “gives place entirely to the ideology of health and survival” (Han, 2021, p. 35), it is not about life but: “Death empties life into survival”.
Using Hegel, the author explains the true meaning of pain: “Pain is the engine of the dialectical formation of the spirit” (p. 75), the formative path is “a painful life: The other, the negative, the contradiction, the split belong, therefore, to the Nature of the spirit” (p. 76) and so interiority.
Jesus, always after some intense moment of preaching or participating in some social event, would leave with the disciples, it was the moment of interiority, but often situations forced him to leave his rest aside and go back to seeing the people (Mk 6 , 31-34):
“He said to them: ‘Come alone to a desert place and rest awhile’… When he disembarked, Jesus saw a large crowd and had compassion, because they were like sheep without a shepherd” and Jesus came back and taught them other things.
He also had moments of pain prior to Easter, when he drank the cup, and little rest.
HAN, Byung-Chul. Sociedade Paliativa: a dor hoje. (Palliative society: pain today). trans. Lucas Machado, Petrópolis: RJ: Ed.Vozes, 2021.
Civilization and being’s malaise
15
Jul
The phrase widely used in literature and sometimes in
the public domain is from Freud: Civilization and its malaise, however, is not only in the field of psychology, the author clarified to be: “impossible to despise the extent to which civilization is built on the renunciation of instinct , how much exactly does it presuppose the non-satisfaction (by oppression, repression, or some other means?) of powerful instincts. This “cultural frustration” dominates the vast field of social relationships among human beings. … It is not easy to understand how it can be possible to deprive an instinct of satisfaction. This is not done with impunity. If the loss is not economically compensated, one can be sure that serious disturbances will result from it”. (Freud, 1930/1997, p. 118).
See that “oppression, repression or some other means” belongs to the author, who could hardly imagine a digital world capable of this, and cultural frustration placed in quotation marks by the author dominates relationships, and who states even more curiously that the search for “economic compensation” is a refuge.
But this was registered in other areas as well, Edmund Husserl wrote about the crisis of the sciences: “In the urgency of our life – we have heard it said – this science has nothing to say to us. It initially excludes precisely the questions that, for men of our unfortunate times, abandoned to the most fateful revolutions, are the pressing questions: the questions about the meaning or absence of meaning of all human existence” (The crisis of the European sciences ), one can also speak of the crisis or night of God, of the identity and the oblivion of Being.
Thus, in Postmodernity, if we dispense with superegoic resources in the Freudian sense, what assures us a cultural mask is the dispute between nations and a new form of defense of honor, for example, which are disguises for the various types of urban violence, the drug addiction, the new presence now of psychopolitics that drives us to consumption and polarization and angers us.
This omnipresence of violence camouflaged in different social relations is what characterizes the end of respect that characterizes a healthy distance between I and the Other, or we include the equal that is my mirror, or we violently repel as an Other.
FREUD, S. (1997). O mal-estar na civilização. In Obras psicológicas completas de Sigmund Freud: edição standard brasileira (Vol. 21, pp. 75-174). Rio de Janeiro: Imago. (Original publicado em 1930). (Civilization and its Discontents)
Topology of Violence
14
Jul
The book Topology of violence (original: Topologie der Gewalt),
can be considered a continuation of the analysis of Sociedade do Cansaço, in which it shows why society is on the brink of collapse, and shows that at the same time a general thesis about its disappearance, a war trend that now gives way to the other, changing its way of operating.
His ideas about violence are innovative and out of common sense, which always thinks of the modern conception of society in freedom, individuality and personal fulfillment, goes in search of the dark side of the subject, where he begins.
This violence is the one that tends to eliminate the other, anonymous, “subjective” and systemic, which is not revealed as it accepts the antagonist’s freedom.
His concept of violence is then that which he defines as functioning in a free individuality, motivated by the activity of persevering and not failing, and with the ambience of efficiency he renounces even making sacrifices at the same time, but entering a whirlpool of limitation, self-exploration and collapse.
All this has a relationship with seduction, which he explained in an interview with El Pais newspaper that seduction cannot be confused with buying: ““I think that not only Greece, but also Spain, are in a state of shock after the crisis financial . The same happened in Korea after the Asian crisis. The neoliberal regime radically implements this state of shock. And here comes the devil, which is called liberalism or the International Monetary Fund, and gives money or credit in exchange for human souls.”
All this to increase credit and give greater incentive to supposed efficiency, and he explains that in the end: “We are all exhausted and depressed. The fatigue society in South Korea is now in a deadly stage,” revealing the little-known side of the country he came from and who speaks property.
And it’s not a happier society, he explains, “the invisible doesn’t exist, so everything is delivered naked, without secret, to be devoured immediately, as Baudrillard said”, he explains that everything should have a veil, however thin, an interiority.
Arroyo, Francesc. Aviso de derrumbe (Crash warning). interview by Byung Chul Han to the daily El País, Spain.
Walking towards a troubled future
13
Jul
Lectures and motivational books have been growing since 
the beginning of the 21st century, it doesn’t matter much the message, the important thing is to lead people to an action force that is performance.
Traditional religions lose adherents to churches that change the discourse of sin for self-help and the desire for recognition and success, political polarization does not leave this aside, a good politician must demonstrate his “deeds” and not his exemption, balance and honesty.
Far from disdaining technological evolution, it is important and can help in a co-immunological resumption, one in which we discover mutuality, the “exam” as described by Byung Chul Han only seeks performance and it can include disrespect and fake- News.
The repressive and disciplinary society of the 20th century described by Michel Foucault (Watch and Punish) loses space to a new form of coercive organization: neuronal violence, fanpages fill up, lives exhibiting performances and even exhibiting violence, which is worrisome.
Interiority, which is different from subjectivity, which is what is proper to the subject, is that internal space that we need to cultivate to make our lives more balanced, with more positive thoughts and actions and that collaborate with mutualism, the feeling of responsibility for the other, the social conscience, finally, the community (the immunological society).
Chul Han points out that subjectivity, already present in discourses of current thinkers, such as “post-industrial society” (Bell, 1999), “control society” (Deleuze, 1992), “cognitive capitalism” or “material economy” (Negri and Lazzarato, 2001, Gorz, 2005) and “biopolitics” (Foucault, 2008) were forms of expression of this subjectivity, however without resorting to interiority.
Society is pushed towards an excess of positivity as Chul Han calls it in his Society of Tiredness, the coercive disciplinary concept (“you shall”) imposed from outside, brought into the scene a new statement (“we can”), which, in its most immanent aspects, “refers to a false freedom by imposing on individuals the imperatives of performance and self-satisfaction.
The author’s analysis starts from the film Black Swan (Aronofsky, 2010) to explain his thesis, the imposition of performance and performance through self-overcoming is incorporated by the protagonist who is taken to the last consequences.
Today’s society of tiredness is nothing more than the unilateral absolutization of “positive power” and cognitive enhancement (neuro-enhancement) may not pose any moral problem, but it will lead to an even greater moral problem in the normativity of the performance society.
Han, Byung Chul. (2015) THE BURNOUT SOCIETY. Translated by ERIK BUTLER stanford briefs. An lmprint of Stanford University Press. Stanford, California.
From language to being
29
Jun
Language as speech and rhetoric is just what is externalized, but if
thought of as ontology, it is the opening (Erschlossenheit) from the silent appropriation of the self, as Heidegger thought of Being and Time, whether the opening (offenheit) is thought of as clearing of being (lichtung des Seins), the one used by thinkers and poets, and which shows itself in the measure of its silent correspondence as being, expressed in Letter on Humanism.
In this text, he writes: “Destiny appropriates itself as a clearing of the Being, which it is, as a clearing. It is the clearing that grants the being’s proximity. In this proximity, in the clearing of Da Lugar, the man lives as a former caretaker, without him being able to experience and assume that dwelling today” (Heidegger, 1967, p. 61)
In general terms, language is a vehicle for the expression of something internal to man, that is, a bridge that links the inside and outside of man, such a way of speaking is thought of as an activity that takes place in which man is the very medium, that’s why there is silence before.
But according to the ontological conception of language, it is not language that belongs to man, but rather man himself conceived ontologically as a resolute being-toward-death or ontologically being that responds as mortal to the silent request of Being.
In more simplistic terms, this is the difference between the being that “has” a language, in the sense of the ability to speak, and the ontological conception that thinks man as “being” through being possessed of the ability to speak, the language here is not just the transmission of information, but the way in which human existence itself manifests.
In this context, communication begins with silence, an emptiness is needed, an epoché in communication, which presupposes an Other who will be a recipient, is not thus a receiver, but a destination of his speech, and this is the way in which human existence itself manifests. .
Thus for Heidegger, but also for Niklas Luhmann, it would be necessary to review the entire theory of Communication, since receiver and transmitter are themselves the non-human environment, and do not “replace” man, they cannot exist or have a relationship as if If man were something accessory, there is all the hallucination of the current Artificial Intelligence, putting receiver and transmitter in the place of source and destination, it would be necessary to foresee a “clearing” of the being “outside” of Being
For this reason, the clearing is internal, we have already posted in another opportunity what Heidegger affirms in his magnum work Being and Time: “Insofar as the being is in force from the aletheia, the self-unveiling emerging belongs to him. We call this the action of self-enlightenment and enlightenment, the clearing” (cf. Being and Time).
HEIDEGGER, Martin. Carta sobre o Humanismo (Letter on humanism). Brazil, Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, 1967, p. 61.
The language as plurality
23
Jun
The problem of interpretation when we are thinking about language
appears as a demonstrative proposition, it occurs when such an interpretation becomes unique and true, Heidegger’s proposal is one of the possibilities of language, but not the only or the main one, when we deal only with logic it does not understand the plurality of language.
This is present in what today is called narrative or discourse, we have already dealt with in several posts when we deal with Paul Ricoeur’s Living Metaphor, but here the issue is ontological: Being.
Science and technique, as well as the ideological narrative does not even touch the essential problem of the question of being, it is focused on what is called natural science or nature:
“natural science can only observe man as something simply present in nature (…) within this scientific-natural project we can only see him as a natural being, that is, we intend to determine the being-man through a method which was absolutely not projected in relation to its peculiar essence” (Heidegger, 2001, p. 53).
This is the reverie of tradition in the conception of language and truth, the one that brings the notion of finitude of being: being is time, for example, accelerating time we think of accelerating being, when in fact it is what causes its emptying , a common theme of the Heideggerians.
We separate the ontological Being from the existential, quoting Heidegger himself, because the analytic falls into another trap which is to link the being to the subject, copula and attribute, creating a structural possibility of language. It is tempting precisely because of its analytic composition, but deep down it is essentially logical and not ontological, Being escapes it.
Such evasion was already foreseen by Heidegger: “the essence of being in its multiplicity can never, in general, be collected from the copula and its meanings” (HEIDEGGER, 2003, p.391).
Language carries its own hermeneutic relationship. Heidegger, based on Being and Time, relocates the question of understanding and the search for truth, which was placed in the scope of the theory of knowledge, and launches it into the existential plane. In this way, the hermeneutic circle emerges, not tied to mere opinion or to functional logicism, nor to the analytic.
Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology brings to light the notion of logos as unveiling, highlighting their belonging to language as the place where the human inhabits, in its finiteness.
HEIDEGGER, M.(2001) Seminário de Zollikon Petrópolis: Vozes.
HEIDEGGER, M. (2003) Os conceitos fundamentais da Metafísica: mundo, finitude, solidão. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária.
The metaphor and the ineffable
11
Jun
The epistemological challenge is pointed out by Paul Ricoeur
of accepting the discovery model, since to reject it “or to reduce it to a provisional experience, which replaces, in the absence of a better one, direct deduction, is to reduce the very logic of discovery to a deductive procedure” (p. 369).
In this context, we highlight the function of the parable that creates a scene that bridges the ineffable and the reality it re-describes, it introduces a plot that produces something beyond the everyday, the parabolic utterance is also metaphorical in this sense.
Like describing a future reality that hasn’t happened yet, the logic has been to re-describe reality using rhetoric, which explores only present reality and denies utopia and fiction.
Ricoeur thus defines the parable as the conjunction of a narrative form and a metaphorical process and also means the narrative of a short fictional story with the aim of interpreting something else that according to the narrator is preferable, in order to interpret it well, to leave it in the sense of the metaphorical.
Future realities that cannot thus simply be described or deduced because they did not actually happen, what will our post-pandemic reality be, what will the human future be like.
Many authors try to unravel this ineffable reality, but it is not deductible, it is a “bridge”.
When explaining the divine realities in the Bible, because Jesus said it was ineffable, he compares it to different situations using a parable, he says in Chapter 4 of the Gospel of Mark (Mark 4:26-27: “Jesus told the crowd: “The Kingdom of God is like when someone scatters the seed on the earth. He goes to sleep and wakes up, night and day, and the seed goes on germinating and growing, but he doesn’t know how it happens…”, compares with the harvest and a tiny seed that is the mustard.
Thus to describe these realities only by logic and deduction is to ignore both the discovery of reality itself and to falsify, for a scientific path, as the divine realities, a tiny seed becomes a beautiful and leafy tree, and this also happens in history
Metaphor-statement and other figures of speech
10
Jun
Paul Ricoeur makes a deep analysis of what he calls the
“Rhétorique generale” as one that reserves only to metalogisms that which incorporates discourses, beyond which there are metasememas, which is a type of figure of speech that modifies the meaning of a word .
Just to give an example within the philosophy of metasemema, the word eidos from Greek culture translated as idea, became in modernity something else that it was for the Greeks.
The importance of this metaphor-statement is said by Ricoeur himself: “the most apt to show the deep kinship, in terms of statements, between metaphor, allegory, parable and fable and, for the same reason, it allows us to open this entire set of figures – metasememas and metalogisms” (Ricoeur, 205, p. 265), while a good part of the discourses (Ricoeur cites Retórique Generale) are reserved only for metalogisms.
The metalogisms are the logics that are beyond the figures of languages, for example an allegory, so Ricoeur creates for the first the concept of a trope, where the meaning of words only changes while the second conflicts with reality itself.
For this, he uses the figure of the “drunken boat” by Rimbaud, who used the expression “the drunken boat joined the great solitary sailboat” (p. 264), which “are allegories of Malraux and Gaulle, as these are neither boats or sailboats”, explains Ricoeur: “the tension is not in the proposition, but in the context”.
The impact of this analysis, as Ricoeur himself points out, is that the “deviation” of the word carried out by the metasememe, the metaphorical utterance “re-establishes the meaning” (p. 265).
This semantic impact “which concerns the entire utterance, so it is necessary to name the entire utterance as a metaphor with its new meaning, and not only the paradigm shift that focuses on one word the mutation of the meaning of the entire utterance” (p. 265) the clearest explanation of his metaphor-statement.
The long analysis made by Ricoeur, by authors known as the classics (Aristotle and Plato), Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, and reasonably known as J. Dubois, F. Edeline, and others little known as Le Guern and Jean Cohen, makes it his own complex but very important work.
The great merit and importance of the deep and hermeneutic analysis of metaphor as the center of the question about current narratives, which involve the linguistic use of various figures of languages such as allegories, parables and metonyms, is shown on page 275, illustrated above, and beyond this discourse to establish a high goal as the one that penetrates the “ineffable”.
RICOEUR, P. Metáfora Viva. Living Metaphor. Brazil, São Paulo, trans. Dion David Macedo. 2nd ed., Ed. Loyola. 2005.
Living metaphor and narrative
09
Jun
Both are themes of Paul Ricoeur, but establishing a clear
connection between these two concepts is no simple task, the author himself will not say between metaphor and narrative, there is such a concept.
This is because, as we have already found in a previous post, it is almost a refoundation of eidos (what was an idea for the Greeks), giving it (the metaphor) an “ideology of the ineffable”, which is nevertheless attainable since it is in the consciousness as an unspoken.
Also in this post we emphasize that living metaphor starts where linguistics ends, and narrative is in close connection with linguistics, but it would be bold to say that narrative is not also a form of metaphor, so in this unexpected intersection between narrative where metaphor lives .
Metaphor in the reading of the Greeks, in Aristotle’s poetics and rhetoric, the word or name are basic units between poetics and rhetoric, while the second is more focused on mimesis.
The idea that language has a function other than the conventional one, was defended by Heidegger saying that it has this other function is poetics, and it refers us both to metaphor and other figures of speech that are beyond the so-called “poetic license”, for it has a rhetorical function.
It is found in the current definition of metaphor as that figure of speech in which an implicit comparison is verified, but what is the relationship between a comparison and metaphor?
Ricoeur clarifies that at the core of this relationship, there is “a small enigma” in the Aristotelian discourse, at the origin of this question, “because this treatise (of Rhetoric), which claims to add nothing to the definition of metaphor given by Poetics, in chapter IV draws a parallel no counterpart in this last treatise, between metaphor and comparison?” (Ricoeur, 2005, p. 42).
Ricoeur’s first response is that it depends “within the Aristotelian corpus” (p. 42), but he will object to the purpose that is not explicit, “Aristotle points out the subordination of comparison to metaphor”, so “it is not to explain here metaphor through comparison, but rather comparison through metaphor” (p. 43).
This enigma becomes the theory of metaphor-statement in Paul Ricoeur, more than a rich figure of speech, it is broken down into two parts: “under the name of ‘parabole’, it is linked to the theory of ‘proof’ (Book I of Rhetoric), which consists of illustration by example, which subdivides, in turn, into historical or fictitious example; the other, under the name of eikon, is linked to the theory of lexis and placed in the domain of metaphor” (p. 44).
The resources and arguments of living metaphor allow us not only to understand the narratives, but also to penetrate their constitutive elements as resources of language and knowledge.
RICOEUR, P. Metáfora Viva. Living Metaphor. Brazil, São Paulo, trans. Dion David Macedo. 2nd ed., Ed. Loyola. 2005.
