Arquivo para a ‘Noosfera’ Categoria
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.
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.
The Examined Life in Love
24
Mar
We can examine that an examined life is according to the great deeds, names that went down
in history, the recent revisions show that it is not quite like that, also tyrants, colonizers and not so honest people can have earthly glories, but fleeting.
The life examined according to Socrates, and also Kurosawa’s assumption in his film Ikiru (Life) is about what was built for the love of others, and this makes a life “well lived”, for this reason Socrates will inspire the creation of the Greek polis, a society at the service of all citizens, even if the concept of citizenship was restricted.
One can always look around and see something good and fair that can be done, many men have done small or large deeds for the public good without receiving any recognition, the old man who dies in the park he helped build in Kurosawa’s film he is happy even in the face of death.
I call this type of clearing of conscience enlightenment, it cannot be made of appearances or subterfuges, it must be done in front of the mirror and of conscience itself, the phenomenon that I believe to be possible, perhaps one day for all humanity (if it is which is not done at the time of death), would make men better because they would lose the masks of their narratives.
There are two Lazarus in the Bible who are misfortunes, the miserable one who stays at the door of a rich man’s house, who waits at the door for alms and leftovers, and Lazaro, friend of Jesus, who, even knowing his death, only goes to visit him 4 days later and he resuscitates him, he doesn’t just do it out of compassion, he also does it out of a pedagogical attitude, after the feat some Jews believed in him for such an accomplishment.
The Reading of John 11: 41-42 says: “Then they took away the stone. Jesus raised his eyes to heaven and said: ‘Father, I thank you for listening to me. I know you always listen to me. But I say this for the sake of the people around me, so that they may believe that you sent me.”
The text says that Jesus wept, so evangelical love is not devoid of feeling, nor is it pure feeling, there is a reason to believe: to believe that love gives dignity to human life.
Blindness, lucidity and serenity
17
Mar
What can be called blindness in the literature, almost always goes beyond the simple 
difficulty of visual functions, at least one must be considered, which is that of the cognitive faculties that ultimately develop and adapt thought to visual perceptions.
Thus there is a civilizing blindness, that which does not perceive the obstacles and even chasms that can open up in the contemporary civilizing process, the forces and the dominance of the forces of nature, as Heidegger thought about the techniques, which prevent reflective thinking.
Looking at blindness only as the difficulty of the visual field, the immediate reality is thus the worst of blindness, incapable of contemplating the essence of Being, what is designated by each man during his personal and social life.
Thus, by developing cognitive functions, man can gain lucidity, look with clarity at his own life and that of his society and culture, can lead him beyond this clarity to a life of serenity and peace, even if he is in a social life in conflict.
It is not comfortable or individualized peace, but one that is capable of dealing with contradictions, oppositions and misunderstandings, common in a process of civilizing crisis.
The reality we live in can lead more quickly to a rupture of lucidity and serenity and the further away from them, the more difficult it is to find paths and paths to return to peace.
One of the most enlightening passages of the Christian biblical reading on blindness is the healing of a man blind from birth, who, therefore, did not develop the cognitive apparatus to see and thus would have difficulty perceiving the objects, colors and beings around him, more than having the function of vision, he cognitively understands what he is seeing.
The passage says the Pharisees questioned the healing of the blind man (Jo 9,10-12): “Then they asked him: ‘How were your eyes opened?’ my eyes and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash’. So I went and washed and began to see.’ They asked him, ‘Where is he?’ He replied, ‘I don’t know.'”
And Jesus’ contemporaries continued in blindness without understanding the healing of the blind man.
From lucidity to serenity
15
Mar
If clearing (or clarity) is a property of lucidity, lucidity precedes serenity, that is, one
can have lucidity without achieving serenity, something very current as a search in modernity.
Heidegger’s “Serenity”, published in 1955, but as a meditation, was made in 1949, on the occasion of the centenary of the death of Conradin Kreutzer, Heidegger’s fellow composer, both born in the city of Messkirch, but at different times.
In this booklet, Heidegger will differentiate reflective (or meditative) thinking from calculating (or machinic) thinking typical of our time, thus comparing the thinking of our time with music, “we limit ourselves to being entertained by a speech. It is not necessary to think while listening to the narration, that is, to meditate (besinnen) on something that, in its essence, on something that, in its essence, concerns each of us directly and continuously” (p. 11)
Thus “The growing absence-of-thoughts is based, therefore, on a process that corrodes the deepest core of contemporary man: “Current Man is ‘on the run’ from thought” (p. 12)
On the other hand, machinic thinking is based on technique (see that the text is from 1955), where “the thought that calculates is not a thought that meditates, it is not a thought that reflects on the meaning that reigns in everything that exists”. ” (p. 13)
Heidegger knows that one of the arguments about reflection is that “pure reflection, persistent meditation, is too ‘elevated’ for common understanding” (p. 14), he says in honoring his fellow musician, that it would be enough to think about what it meant in that time. At the moment his homeland, where Kreutzer’s extraordinary music emerged, I remember a short story by Leon Tostoi who spoke of this dynamic of feelings precisely in a short story called “Sonata a Kreutzer”.
He thus proposes to those present “what does this celebration suggest to us, if we are willing to meditate? in this case, we note that, from the soil of the homeland, a work of art grew (gedieben). (p. 15)
So no high thinking is needed, just a little break, a silence in the soul.
HEIDEGGER, M. Serenidade (Serenity). trans. Translation by Maria Madalena Andrade and Olga Santos. Lisbon: Instituto Piaget, s/d.
What’s beyond human
03
Mar
Certainly existing nature, the planets and the entire universe, when seen more by human
devices: interplanetary travel and the James Webb megatelescope, more complex and challenging human intelligence.
But there is something in man in the human beyond that is in his conscience and in his feelings and affections, there is a complex divine spark, says the poet that makes him look outside for what is inside.
Imagining that this could be in a machine is just one of the aspects of control and the will to human power, whose theme we developed last week, the transhuman creates a fiction and a human fantasy that man himself would create something to overcome it, the great fantasy of the development of the resources of the current Artificial Intelligence, everything that is there the man who put it.
It is the human desire to be your own creator and who knows how to reach an earthly divinity, but contrary to what you seek, technology does not only have the purpose of destroying and also of helping, it can, by daydream, impel extra-human forces of destruction.
We were created because man has not always existed on earth, and even the hypothesis that we come from other celestial bodies, the fantasy of aliens, which may even exist, will be created by something that has an infinite consciousness and greater than ours, had to there is a celestial and ontological creative principle, with logic of being (onto).
This mystical fantasy makes sense, because any self-respecting science, philosophy, or theology will speculate about human creation, and any eschatology will wonder about our destiny.
There is a moment in Jesus’ earthly life, the historical figure is indisputable, in which he reveals himself as divine to his disciples, who are so amazed that they want to build three tents and stay there, the event called “Mount Tabor” (Photo), where they were with Jesus only three disciples.
(Mt 17,1-3): “Jesus took with him Peter, James and John, his brother, and led them to a place apart, on a high mountain. And he was transfigured before them; his face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light. Then Moses and Elijah appeared to him, talking with Jesus.”
Power and interiority
24
Feb
Clarified in the previous post the difference between soul and spirit, the concept used by
Hegel to develop the (metaphysical, for him “subjective”) idea of power uses an analogy of digestion, which Byung Chul Han takes advantage of:
“Power is, for Hegel, already effective at the most elementary level of life. Digestion, in this way, is already the process of power in which the living being takes with him, little by little, his other identity” (Chul Han, What is Power?), he goes so far as to say that the living being generates identity with the other, but ignores that in its genesis there is a metaphysical process.
Nietzsche will develop this issue as the will to power, in this case confused with the domination that we have already dealt with here and which is a sociological category, but power as a metaphor, in our view the most appropriate, is what we generate in our digestive interiority.
How do we digest the image of the other as our identity or not, as we recognize differences not only in the genotype, but mainly in the differences in feelings, judgments and decisions, more broadly according to our cosmovision.
So the desire for peace or war with what is different, tolerance or intolerance in diversities of thought about the world and things should not be in the category of right and wrong, of course, wrong should be punished, but what is wrong it must be circumscribed within the limits of the human, so if killing is wrong, war is a serious mistake where one people can exterminate another.
The renunciation of this metaphysical power, generated in our interiority and our vision of the world, must always be internalized (digested) also as a will, a command, of the non-power.
The biblical lesson on this issue, described as the “temptations of Christ”, is found in the passage Mt 4,1-11.
In the passage after fasting and renouncing the power to turn stones into bread and saying that he should fall on the city of Jerusalem, the devil tempts him with power and shows him the kingdoms of the world: “and he said to him: “I will give you all this, if you kneel before me to worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Get thee behind me, Satan, for it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve. Then the devil left him. And the angels approached and served Jesus ′′ (Mt 4. 9-11).
Power and soul
23
Feb
There is nothing in the sociological discourse that actually unveils what the Spirit is, the great
reason why philosophy came to re-work the question of the Other (Levinas, Ricoeur and even Habermas and Chul-Han resumed it) is that the vision idealist is centered on the “I”, vulgar thought has also followed this path: the “mystery”, the key to success, etc.
To have a relationship with the soul, it is necessary to know not the ex-sistence (ex-outside and cistere – cistern), but that God is, his essence is Being in his fullness and thus in him there is ontological fullness and thus the soul, from the Greek anima, is what He inserts into man to give him life.
Thus, its power is ontological, Byung Chul Han manages to relate Heidegger with his conception of power, and also of religion with power, but his reading is dualistic at this point, either religion or ontology, it is true that there is a theo-ontology, but there is a strong relationship.
The relationship that Chul Han establishes is described as follows: “Although God is ‘subjectivity’, this is not exhausted in the abstract identity, without content, of ‘I am I’. He does not remain in an eternal silence and hermeticism´” (Han, 2019, p. 120), quotes he takes from Lectures in the philosophy of religion by Hegel, and it is not surprising that he thinks, he is close to Buddhism and asceticism it’s human.
We already wrote in the previous post that God is power in the Hegelian view, and Chul Han describes it from the idealist idea: “for He is a power of being Himself” (Han, 2019, p. 121), and thus there is no relationship of creation (and not immanence) with everything that exists, including man and his soul. Unlike the Spirit developed by Hegel (Phenomenology of the Spirit), without the relationship with the soul there is no Trinitarian God, in addition to the divine-human Jesus, the Holy Spirit, third person.
Through a true asceticism, man knows a true power, which is not domination in its sociological description, but an ontological relationship with its ascension, through which the biblical reading says man truly rises.
A passage from the divine reading, in which Matthew reveals as a lesson from Jesus (Mt 4,25): “For what good is it for a man to gain the whole world if he loses himself and destroys himself?”, that is, if he destroys his soul.
Han, Byung-Chul. (2018) What is power?. NY; Wiley. (2019 portuguese version)
