Arquivo para a ‘Noosfera’ Categoria
The cosmos, the noosphere and perdition
23
Oct
In the chapter on “The loss of salvation, the
unknown adventure” in Edgar Morin’s book Terra-Patria, he takes a deep look at our lack of cosmovision and the perdition of our microscopic concerns that don’t look at the larger world and reality around us.
He says at the beginning: “If there were space navigators, their route in the Virgo cluster would ignore the very marginal Milky Way and pass far from the small peripheral sun that orbits the tiny planet Earth. Like Robinson on his island, we set out to send signals towards the stars, so far in vain, and perhaps in vain forever. We are lost in the cosmos” (Morin, 2003, p. 163).
He adds: “This world that is ours is very fragile at the base, almost inconsistent: it was born of an accident, perhaps of a disintegration of the infinite, unless we consider that it arose from nothing” (idem, p. 163).
But in modern times, man has made his ego bigger, he wants to be a kind of “Homo Deus” using the metaphor of Yuval Harari, whose subtitle is “a brief history of tomorrow”, also pessimistic like Morin, but the author of Terra-Pátria hopes that man will find a new, more promising future.
Morin recognizes that “Life, consciousness, love, truth and beauty are ephemeral… We are on the move. We are on the move. We are not marching along a demarcated path, we are no longer guided by the law of progress, we have neither messiah nor salvation, we walk in the night and in the fog” (pgs. 164), he adds: “We are on an unknown adventure. The dissatisfaction that makes the journey begin again could never be satisfied by this. We must assume uncertainty and restlessness, we must assume dasein, the fact that we are there without knowing why” (p. 166), recalling this category dear to Heidegger, who elaborated on the ‘forgetfulness of being’.
How to start the journey again, we might ask, the author gives a “good news-bad news” (recalling the good news meaning of the word Gospel): “Here is the bad news: we are lost, irretrievably lost. If there is a gospel, that is, good news, it must start from the bad news: we are lost, but we have a roof, a house, a homeland: the small planet where life has created its garden, where humans have formed their home, where from now on humanity must recognize its common home (p. 166), and the response, even if agnostic, is no different from the evangelical one.
And then he recalls this call: “The call to fraternity is not confined to one race, one class, one elite, one nation. It comes from those who, wherever they are, hear it within themselves, and it is addressed to each and every one. Everywhere, in every class, in every nation, there are beings of ‘good will’ who convey this message” (Morin, 2003, p. 167).
And those of us who know this message, this hope, must not remain silent, indifferent or, what is much worse, adhere to hopelessness. We must remember that Gospel message: “To whom much has been given, much will be required” (Luke 12:39-48) under penalty of omission, distortion or abandonment of the fundamental message of earthly and heavenly salvation.
MORIN, Edgar and Kern, Anne-Brigitte. (2003) Terra-Patria “Earth-Patria”. Transl. Paulo Azevedo Neves da Silva. Brazil, Porto Alegre : Sulina.
Truth, noesis and The Bad
11
Oct
In the prolegomena to the first volume of Logical Investigations, Husserl,
who had been strongly influenced by Franz Brentano, the father of social psychology, sees relativism and its basis in the turbid worldview as a problem, so the relativity of the existence of a world is neither objective nor subjective, but “the complete objective unity that corresponds to the ideal system of all truths of fact, and is inseparable from it” (HUSSERL, 2005, p. 136).
This is because each type of object has its own possible developments, so to speak, it has its own method prescribed a priori by laws of essence determined by the eidos of the objectivity in question (Husserl, 2006, 309), which means that it is the essence of the objectivity that predetermines the type of concordant development one has in experiencing it.
There can be the experience of evidence in this experience of the object, and this contributes to its status as an entity as a “true being” (Husserl, 2006, p. 309), what Husserl called “Lebenswelt”, a logic of life, in this case of the experience of the object.
In this way, an object that is “pure X” remains stable in the midst of the multiplicity of noematic characters that emerge in the course of an experience, the object targeted in thought by human consciousness, it precedes the first intuitive idea that is noesis (thinking X).
Husserl wrote that this noetic vision is a synthesis of identity, a central concept for establishing the “effective”, “true” object, the objectivity apprehended in evident donation, in a synthesis of concordant identity:
To every “truly existing” object corresponds as a matter of principle (in the a priori of unconditioned eidetic generality) the idea of a possible consciousness, in which the object itself is originally apprehensible and, moreover, in perfect adequacy. Conversely, if this possibility is guaranteed, the object is ipso truly existent” (HUSSERL, 2006, p. 316).
The syntheses involved in phenomenological thinking, for establishing the “being” or “non-being” of noematic correlated objects, are “intentionalities of a higher order”, which is what Husserl took from Franz Brentano’s neo-Thomist thinking, getting rid of the psychologism, the eidos that we have of good and evil, still scholastic from the father of social psychology.
In Husserl’s view, the intentionality of the evident giving of aspects of the object that are not yet present forms an intentional horizon, which in turn brings its predetermined potentialities, so the factual visions of war and peace, of the devil and evil are false.
They are ill-formed intentionalities (in the sense that they don’t have a noetic truth), the truth as “being”, as “the true” in the phatic and idealist readings, is for Husserl an “effectiveness” (Wirklichkeit) since it has coherence at its core.
Husserl, E. (2005) Investigações lógicas. Primeiro volume: Prolegômenos à lógica pura. Tradução de D. Ferrer. Lisbon, PT: Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa.
Husserl, E. (2006) Ideias para uma fenomenologia pura e para uma filosofia fenomenológica. Tradução de M. Suzuki. Brazil, Aparecida, SP: Ideias & Letras.
Narrative and truth
26
Sep
It’s not just some thinkers like Edgar Morin,
Peter Sloterdijk and Mario Bunge who complain about the difficulty of elaborating thought in a truthful way, the fundamentals have been lost and narratives dominate even areas like science and religion, not to mention politics which is the realm of narratives, peace, climate and social security are part of rhetoric.
In Byung-Chul Han’s book “The Crisis of Narration” he recovers an essay by Hungarian writer Peter Nadás “Betsutsame Ortsbestimmung” (I don’t think there is a Portuguese translation, but Han translated the title as Location pending), which tells the story of a village where in the center stands a huge wild pear tree.
Nadás describes this village as a narrative community that gathers around the pear tree “on warm summer evenings” for “ritual contemplation” and ratifies the “collective content of consciousness” (Han, 2023, p. 121), where there is “no opinion about this or that, but uninterrupted narration of a single great story” (Há, p. 122) and where they used to “sing softly … Today there are no more of these trees and the singing of the village has died down” (Nadás, apud Han, 2023, p. 122).
The Korean philosopher adds: “That ‘ritual contemplation’ that ratifies the collective content of consciousness gives way to the noise of communication and information” (Han, p. 122), “that ‘singing’ that tunes the villagers into a story and thus unites them” (Idem).
What they experience from “noisy” communication “does not create any social cohesion, it does not create a We. On the contrary, it dismantles both solidarity and empathy” (Han, 2023, p. 123).
Han’s philosophical critique is clear: “But not all the constitutive narratives of a community are based on the exclusion of the Other, insofar as there is also an inclusive narrative that does not cling to an identity” (Han, 2023, p. 124) and even quotes Kant’s Perpetual Peace, despite all its conservative idealism.
His universalism is clear: “Every human being enjoys unrestricted hospitality. Every human being is a citizen of the world … He [Novalis] imagines a ‘world family’ beyond nation and identity. He elevates poetry as a form of reconciliation and love” (p. 125).
The author, based on Novalis, also refers to the issue of complexity that contemplates the whole: “The individual lives in the whole and the whole in the individual. It is through poetry that the highest sympathy and coactivity originate, the most intimate communication” (Han, 2023, p. 125).
Han, B.-C. (2023). A crise da narração. Transl. Daniel Guilhermino. Brazil. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes.
The difference of the divine Love
19
Sep
Hannah Arendt’s reading of Saint Augustine
in her doctoral thesis remains between these two interpretations of human and divine love.
To analyze this, Arendt interprets Augustine’s work as governed by three principles that appear without apparent contradiction. She increased Augustine’s dogmatic rigidity to the extent that Christianity was inserted into his thinking, this consisting of his passage from pre-theological, philosophical thinking to theological thinking, according to the author.
Thus the first part of the author’s thesis, entitled “Love as desire: the anticipated future”, approaches love from a philosophical perspective of continuity with Hellenic thought, in which love is seen as a disposition that is always driven by lack, by something that is not possessed, but which one hopes to have, as a means of achieving happiness, thus desire is something not yet achieved while Love is the desire obtained, and this is philosophical.
These two types of love are given two names by Augustine: caritas and cupiditas. They differ in their love for the object they love, “but both right and wrong love (caritas and cupiditas) have this in common – desirous longing, that is, appetitus”, writes the author.
Caritas is pure, true love, because it desires God, eternity and the absolute future, while cupiditas loves the world, the things of the world, here it is pre-theological, because charity is not just a passing love, or desire for a passing good, but for the eternal.
Whether we are religious or not, we are between desire and possession, after we have obtained the desired object in general, and enjoyed the pleasure of this possession, cupiditas passes and something eternal remains if there is caritas in it, that is an Eternal Love, which gives an eternal possession and then does not pass away.
So the man who has this quest must withdraw into himself, and within himself, isolating himself from the world, he penetrates the Augustinian “quaestio”, the guiding thread that Arendt pursues: “for the more he withdrew into himself and collected himself in the dispersion and distraction of the world, the more he became a ‘question for himself’,” wrote the author.
Every philosophy has a basic question, and Augustine’s becomes theological: “What do I love when I love my God?” (Confessions X, 7, 11 apud Arendt p. 25), even if it is “in the world”.
Thus the second part of her thesis is called “and ‘Creature and Creator: the remembered past’, in book X of Confessions. “Memory, then, opens the way to a transmundane past as the original source of the very notion of a happy life,” the author wrote about Augustine.
In proposing a relationship with the Creator, man does not lose himself, but finds himself, and this is different from any kind of worldly attachment, the god of money, consumption or desire.
Arendt, Hannah. (1996) Love and Saint Augustine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Hannah Arendt and Love´s Mundi
18
Sep
Hannah Arendt was, in our view, instigated
by her existential drama, and within it, to take up the question of Love as an essential issue from an early age, writes Safransky:
“At the beginning of 1924, an 18-year-old Jewish student arrived in Marburg wanting to study with Bultmann and Heidegger. She was Hannah Arendt. She came from a good assimilated Jewish family in Könisberg, where she had grown up. By the age of 14, her curiosity had already been aroused. She read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and mastered Greek and Latin so well that at the age of 16 she founded a study and reading circle for ancient literature. Even before her final exams at the Könisberg high school, she spent a season in Berlin, where she read Heidegger and took lessons from Romano Guardini (a specialist in Kierkegaard),” Safranski wrote about Hannah.
While still a teenager, the thinker who had already formed a philosophy circle as an adolescent, wrote her first concerns, Hannah Arendt wrote the poem Consolation (Trost):
“The hours pass, Die Stunden verrinnen / The days pass, Die Tage vergehen, / There remains one grace Es bleibt ein Gewinnen / The simple persisting. Das blosse Bestehen.” (Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, For Love of the World, p. 53).
In a letter from Heidegger to her, “And what can we do but open ourselves, but let it be what it is? To let ourselves be in such a way that love becomes for us a pure/chaste joy (reine Freude) and the source of each new day of life. To be elevated to what we are. In any case, it would be possible for one of us to ‘say’ and open up to the other. We can only say, however, that the world is no longer mine or yours, but ours”.
Thinking of the world as “ours” and not mine is a necessity of our time, an essential step towards our world problems. When we read Hannah’s doctoral thesis “The Concept of Love in St. Augustine” (ARENDT, 1998), we understand that there was an attempt to go beyond the existential and get to the essence of love, and the search for amor mundi.
When reading Augustine of Hippo, the subject of her doctoral thesis, she observes the separation between love and enjoyment: “this joy lies in loving love without inscribing it in something particular and fleeting”, and then emphasizes: “Love hopes to find its own fulfillment in eternity” (Arendt, The Concept of Love in Saint Augustine, p. 35).
Despite this reference to “eternity”, Arendt doesn’t get to that theological virtue: love, which must be combined in an “existential” way as faith and hope, since in eternity, for those who believe, faith and hope will already be in fullness in Love.
ARENDT, H. (1998) O conceito de amor em santo Agostinho. Transl. de Alberto Pereira Dinis. Portugal, Lisboa: Instituto Piaget.
SAFRANSKI, R. (2000) Heidegger, um mestre da Alemanha entre o bem e o mal (biografia). Transl. de Lya Luft. Apresentação de Ernildo Stein. Brazil, São Paulo: Geração Editorial.
Joy, sacrifice and hope
13
Sep
Pain is part of human reality, and so no joy is
everlasting if it doesn’t understand sacrifice, in the etymology of the word “sacred office”, it’s not exactly pain, as Byung-Chul Han describes in The Palliative Society: pain today, meaningless pain, it’s “bodily affliction”, pain has become a thing, it has lost an ontological and in a way “eschatological” meaning, “meaningless pain is possible only in a bare life emptied of meaning, which no longer narrates”. (Han, 2021, p. 46).
Han cites literary authors such as Paul Valéry, for whom in his book Monsieur Teste “is silent in the face of pain. Pain robs him of speech” (Han, 2021, p. 43), and also Freud, for whom ”pain is a symptom that indicates a blockage in a person’s history. The patient, because of his blockage, is unable to move forward in the story” (p. 45).
It is with the Christian mystic Teresa of Avila, as a kind of counterfigure of pain, “in her, pain is extremely eloquent. The narrative begins with pain. The Christian narrative verbalizes pain and also transforms the body of the mystic into a stage … deepens the relationship with God … produces intimacy, an intensity” (p. 44). For those who don’t know, it was through reading this book that the philosopher Edith Stein, a disciple of Husserl like Heidegger, converted to Christianity.
Sacrifice is the art of living joyfully through pain. Of course, it’s a mistake to think about and desire pain, but if it comes, and someday it will, it can be re-signified as a “sacred office” that is offered. Byung-Chul Han wrote about it: “Suffering is not a symptom, nor is it a diagnosis, but a very complex human experience.” Only great mystics have penetrated it.
In Mark’s Gospel (Mk 9:31), Jesus shocks his disciples by teaching them in secret: “And he said to them, ”The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him. But three days after his death he will rise again,” and then he denies all forms of human power: ‘Whoever wants to be first, let him be servant of all,’ and finally he teaches the simplicity of children: ‘Whoever welcomes one of these children welcomes me,’ is different from what they think today.
Understanding pain, the inverted logic of power and the simplicity and innocence of children is a distant logic in a civilization in crisis, hedonistic, authoritarian and full of malice.
Han, B-C. (2021) A Sociedade paliativa: a dor hoje. Transl. Lucas Machado, Brazil, Petrópolis: ed. Vozes.
Joy in the midst of crisis
11
Sep
It´s possible to maintain joy in the midst of crisis,
economic difficulties and wars that threaten us? This is not about naivety or mere alienation, others prefer to think about maintaining their essential assets: food, health and safe housing.
Byung-Chul theorizes that despite the “difference” between Derridá and Heidegger (see our posts about Heidegger´s heart book) there is a structural affinity in their vision of mourning, which is characterized by the renunciation of the subject’s autonomy in Derrida: “No matter how narcissistic our subjective speculation continues to be, , it can no longer close itself to this gaze, before which we ourselves show ourselves the moment we convert it into our mourning or we can give up on it [faire de lui notre dueil], mourning, making ourselves mourn for ourselves, I mean, I mourn the loss of our autonomy, for everything that made us the measure of ourselves” (Han, p. 430 citing Derridá’s text “Krafter der Trauer”, strengthening of pain), this That is, they both have in common a vision of renouncing the autonomy of the subject, the “I” of idealism.
Here the important thing is not to let mourning work (let us remember the concept already seen in the posts about “work mourning”) it is replaced in Derridá by a game of mourning: “however, the happier the joy, the purer the sadness that sleeps in it. The deeper the sadness, the more it calls us to joy…” (Han, pg. 430-431), but Heidegger’s mourning, explains Han, does not kill death, trying to kill it results in something even worse: “ wanting to resurrect, violently and actively surpassing the limit of death would only drag them (the gods) into a false and non-divine proximity and would bring death instead of our life” (Han, pg. 431-432 quoting Heidegger).
Heidegger explains that it is “not a symptom that can be eliminated by psychoeconomic accounting. He does not have a deficient trait that involves work (of mourning).
This “withdrawn” or “saved” for which Heidegger’s “holy and mourning” heart beats is not subject to economics, this “saved” cannot be spent or capitalized, it is therefore that which is and characterizes renunciation, Han does not exemplifies, but we can think of humanitarian aid in disasters and wars, as it will characterize the identity of renunciation and gratitude as conceivable outside of economics, using Heideggerian terms “grievously bear the need to renounce” and promises the “unthinkable donation”.
A profound and wise phrase by Heidegger says, renunciation is the “highest form of possession”, it seems contrary, but we only really have what we can give because otherwise it is a commodity of exchange, and even more so renunciation becomes gratitude and “ duty of gratitude”, this pain increases and becomes joy: “the deeper the sadness, the more the joy that rests in it calls us”. (pg. 433), but it does not even become sublimation, which forces us to “work”, as it is the “inhibition of all income” and the “awareness of the emptiness and poverty of the world”.
Praise of misery one might think, is not a praise of moderate and continuous joy, different from the euphoria and ecstasy that is followed by depression, “the lack of the divine brings about mourning, goes back to an obstinate forgetfulness of being, in which Heidegger inscribes the divine” (Han, p. 433-434), but it is certainly not yet the biblical divine, but surrounds it.
The reward and joy of the Divine inscribed in the being, is that which renounces and gives, but knows that there will be a reward of receiving a hundred times more, not in goods, but in joy.
Han, Byung-Chul (2023) Coração de Heidegger: sobre o conceito de tonalidade afetiva em Martin Heidegger (Heidegger’s heart: on the concept of affective tonality in Martin Heidegger). Transl. Rafael Rodrigues Garcia, Milton Camargo Mota. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes.
The sky can speak
06
Sep
Sloterdijk assumes the time that through the
ages men “made gods speak”, this is also what he says about the “speech” of Jesus, and he says with historical propriety: “Finally, those who were invoked too much also made themselves known through the personal incarnation: sometimes they took the liberty of resorting to apparent bodies that came and went as they pleased.” (pg. 22), it is true and this means: Do not use God’s name in vain.
But historical reasoning helps better with the other alternative use of “God”: “… or they were condensed, “in the fullness of time”, into a Son of Man, into a saving Messiah. After Cyrus II, the king of the Persians famous for his religious tolerance, allowed the Jews who had been taken captive to Babylon to return to Palestine in 539 BC, putting an end to an exile of almost sixty years… The spiritual elite of the Jews became much more receptive to messianic good news — Second Isaiah set the tone for this.” (p. 22).
He correctly says when he calls Cyrus “panegyric” (worship of an abstract god), he did not convert or even abandon his beliefs in other gods, as “an instrument of God” he freed a people, the author also recalls Marcião who worshiped “the unknown god” that will make Paul call the Greeks a religious people, but states that the known God is the one that the apostle of the Gentiles (Paul) proclaims in the figure of Jesus, the Redeemer.
The issue of redemption pointed out by Sloterdijk from a historical point of view, has its meaning as these are moments in which “heaven opened”, but he sees it as a spectacle where “The oldest stage of evidence from sensitive and supersensitive sources is shown in the form of commotion of the participants generated by a “spectacle”, a solemn rite, a fascinating hecatomb.” (pg. 24) and this has been repeated throughout the ages, with great speakers and great “media experts”, but this will be the true God, of Augustine as Sloterdijk himself cites him (De vera religione).
He is also right when he says about some who consider themselves to have “divine” gifts: “. In general, it was assumed that there were interpreters capable of associating a practical meaning with the encoded symbols” (pg. 25), but again not these false oracles that seek spotlight.
See how Jesus asks for the healing of a man born deaf/mute (Mc 7,34-36): “Looking at the sky, he sighed and said: “Ephphatah!”, which means: “Open up!” Immediately his ears opened, his tongue loosened, and he began to speak without difficulty. Jesus insistently recommended that they not tell anyone. But, the more he recommended, the more they disclosed”, this small detail that appears in many miracles, do not disclose, that is, it is not a spectacle, it does not mean not doing it well, however, with a sacred sense.
The meaning of this cure is deeper, in addition to making a world deaf from birth hear and speak, reading previous excerpts from the evangelist Mark we find the absurd idea (present in today’s “religious” circles), using the idea of a Syro-Phoenician woman whose daughter had a “demon”, it is not the idea that an illness or some bad occurrence is “punishment from heaven”, as it is from the heart of man that “impure” things come out: evil, greed, etc.
The Ephphatah (open sky) said to cure a deaf-mute from birth is because it is not a common disease, someone whose life and cognitive system were not taught to listen and speak, did so immediately, it´s complex.
In dark times, it is necessary for the deaf to hear and the mute to speak, as there are those who want to remain silent.
Sloterdijk, P. (2024). Fazendo o céu falando; a teopoesia (Making the sky speak: on theopoetry), Trans. Nélio Schneider, Brazil, São Paulo: ed. Estação Liberdade.
Inner life and happiness
30
Aug
We live in pure exteriority, modern man does not
know the interior life, he is projected onto things and actions, he believes he can extract from it what is missing internally.
Byung-Chul Han in his essay “Vita Contemplativa” [contemplation life] quotes a short story by Walter Benjamin “Do not forget the best” in which he recalls a little shepherd boy, “who is allowed, on “a Sunday”, to enter the mountain of his treasures, but with the cryptic instruction: “don’t forget the best”. The best means not doing it.” (Han, 2023, pg 33).
Reading Being in modernity, Han writes: “The crisis of the present consists of everything that could give meaning and guidance to life and is breaking. Life does not rely on anything resistant to support it.” (pg. 87), recalls quoting Hanna Arendt who claims to “find uncertain shelter in the darkness of the human heart” which still has the ability to say: “to remember and say: forever” (idem) and remembers immortality in this aspect.
When contemplating the being that has a temporal dimension: “It grows long and slowly. The current short term dismantles it.” (pg. 89) and quotes Niklas Luhmann about the (current) information: “His cosmology is a cosmology not of being, but of contingency” (pg. 89 quoting Luhmann).
But it remembers immortality translated in this crisis as: “The search for immortality, for immortal glory, is, according to Arendt, “the source and center of the vita activa.” Human beings achieve their immortality on the political stage” (pg. 145), but true immortality is the eternal.
Then Han writes: “In contrast, the vita contemplativa is not, according to Arendt, persisting and lasting in time, but the experience of the eternal, which transcends both time and the surrounding world.” (idem page 145).
Arendt admires Socrates, writes Han, “who voluntarily renounces immortality” (pg. 146) and thus remembers that even writing becomes vita activa, and creates a temporary immortality, which Han remembers that Arendt also sought when writing.
But it is not a question of abandoning the complement of the vita contemplativa which is the vita activa, what happens is that the “animal laborans” (as Arendt calls the modern one): “is ruining all human capacities, especially action” (Han, 2023, p. 149).
Remember that the capacity for action arises from thought “which is not irrelevant to the human future, because if we considered the different activities of the Vita activa [active life] in relation to the question of which of them would be the most active and in which of them the experience of the active being would be expressed in a purer way, then the result would be that thought all activities with regard to pure active being” (Han, 2023, pgs. 149-150).
So it is not from our outside that our bad actions come from, but rather they are inside us.
Han, B.-C. (2023). Vita contemplativa. Trans. Lucas Machado. Brazil, Petrópolis: Ed. Vozes.
Justice, ideia and thinking
29
Aug
The three words are important at a time of
great crisis in thought (what is), what is an idea, and the idea of justice or the just, explored by current thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas (we mentioned in a previous post on the issue of including Outro) and we quote in passing the two volumes of Paul Ricoeur o Justo (volume two published by Martins Fontes in Brazil) although the author himself says that it is an essay, he penetrates a deeper aspect, the question of truth and morals.
Reading the text, Inclusion of the Other by Habermas, clarifies that in philosophical terms, that morality in John Rawls, in Kantian terms, has differences between Kant’s original political liberalism and Kantian republicanism, which is how Rawls defends it, this would be enough, but there is a long analysis in Volume 1 by Paul Ricouer on justice in Rawls.
To understand Ricoeur’s book 2 it is necessary to understand that for the Greeks the first philosophy is that which for them, and the ontological resumption has to do with this, metaphysics as questions about Being, existence, the cause and the meaning of reality and physis (nature) must be placed prior to the second, aspects linked to logic and ethics.
Book 2 addresses what seems most essential in Ricoeur, although he confesses that it is an essay, its goal is “to justify the thesis that theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy are of equal levels; as none of it is first philosophy in relation to what Stanislas Breton characterized as the meta- function (I myself defended this reformulation of metaphysics in terms of the meta- function, in which “the maximum genres” of the dialectic of Plato’s last dialogues would be united and Aristotelian speculation on the plurality of the meaning of being or beings) “ (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 63) … but he did not speak (initially it was written in a conference) about this but rather about the two second philosophy.
His analysis is based “initially, thinking about justice and truth without each other; in a second moment, think about them in a way of reciprocal or crossed presupposition” (Ricoeur, 2008, p. 64) and this undertaking “has nothing revolutionary, it is located in the line of speculations about transcendentals…” (idem).
When approaching the first stage of the analysis: “I thought of Rawls’ statement at the beginning of Théorie de la justice: “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, just as truth is the first virtue of theories” (pg. 65) and There the author takes up the ethical part of another text of his: Soi-même comme um autre, to “guarantee the eminent status of justice”.
The idea developed there is that this triad leads to “equity”, it is not the dualism between the Self and the Other (the next one also uses Ricoeur), “the triad belongs to the horizontal axis and does not consist absolutely in the simple juxtaposition between the self, the near and far; it is the same dialectic of the self. The desire to live well roots the moral project of life, in desire and lack, as marked by the grammatical structure of the desire… but without the mediation of the other two terms of the triad, the desire for a good life would be lost in the nebula of the variable figures of happiness… I would say that the short circuit between wanting a good life and happiness is the result of ignorance of the dialectical constitution of the self” (pg. 66).
The author formulates the idea of distance in these terms: “fair distance, a middle ground between the very little distance typical of many dreams of emotional fusion and the excess of distance fueled by arrogance, contempt, hatred of the strange, unknown. I would see in the virtue of hospitality the closest emblematic impression of this culture of just distance” (pg. 66).
Justice on the vertical axis, that of power and norm, is seen by the author as follows: “on the vertical axis that leads to the pre-eminence of practical wisdom and, with it, justice as equity, a first observation can be made regarding the relationship between kindness and justice. The relationship is neither one of identity nor difference; goodness characterizes the goal of the deepest desire and, thus, belongs to the grammar of wanting.
I consider the triad to be the self, the other and the distant, if also seen as a transcendent alterity, there is another “unknown” that can be divine and a carrier of messages, in network theory for example the “weak link” is considered fundamental , Ricoeur’s essay is rich, however, when returning to the question of the Kantian categorical imperative, which justifies political idealism, I believe that Habermas is correct in stating that this is the mistake in John Rawls’ consistent and very current “A Theory of Justice”. influential.
A part of the biblical reading can expand the concept of this distant as transcendent otherness (Mt 5,20): “Unless your righteousness is greater than the righteousness of the teachers of the Law and the Pharisees, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven”, which in the deontological sense one could say “you will not enter into the truth of justice”.
A part of the biblical reading can expand the concept of this distant as transcendent otherness (Mt 5,20): “Unless your righteousness is greater than the righteousness of the teachers of the Law and the Pharisees, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven”, which in the deontological sense one could say “you will not enter into the truth of justice”.
Ricoeur, P. (2008) Justo 2: justice and truth and other studies (in portuguese). Trans. Ivone C. Benedetti. Brazil, São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2008.
