Arquivo para a ‘Noosfera’ Categoria
Moral force and warfare
10
Mar
Those who promote hatred and intolerance, even if beyond
values, only see it as dependent on human capacity, Mahatma Gandhi who won the English domination without using military force said: “Strength does not come from physical capacity”.
It inspired many pacifists in the 1960s, including those who were against the war in Vietnam, which was also a war of invaders, in this case, Americans.
Military analysts are surprised by Ukraine’s ability to resist amid a huge disadvantage of war power with Russia, although in military jargon there is the idea of ”troop morale” it is associated only with the battlefield and not with values.
For a moral force to exist, it must also exist in the spiritual field, in the case of Gandhi it was Hinduism that for decades inspired and attracted many in the Western world, including personalities from the pop world, such as the Beatles.
Thus, the moral degradation of the western world is also indirectly responsible for the war and in its logic, which is also the logic of NATO, only the military force is victorious and protective of its “values”, but these are in crisis and do not recognize it.
Ukraine thus ended up turning to its neighbors and the threat they also fear of Russian invasion, which hides an expansionist interest, gave rise to a third bloc to help Ukraine defend its territory: Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Sweden, Finland and Canada. , countries previously seen as “pacifist”.
This bloc broke a tradition of not using weapons to help the defense of Ukraine, completes this bloc the United Kingdom, which is good to remember is out of the European Union, due to Brexit, which attracts them in addition to the fear of being the next targets of the Russia is the defense of values beyond those warlike, which ultimately also defends NATO.
It is true that they oscillate between the use of weapons and pacifism, but they realize that there is no way to prevent Putin’s expansionist desires, whose historical narrative begins with the formation of the Soviet Union, with no previous history, of the native peoples.
The logic of hate, whichever side it is on, is ultimately war, that of love is peace.
The Three Temptations and the Three Scourges
04
Mar
There is a strong connection between the 3 vicious scourges of
humanity: famine, war and pestilence, and the three great temptations of Christ in the desert: food (Jesus in the desert was fed by angels), power and contempt for divine things that can limit us morally. and civilized.
Yesterday, in the conversation between the President of France and Putin, he said: “the worst is yet to come”, the lands of Ukraine are fertile and are major producers of food and Russia of fertilizers.
On Wednesday we begin Lent and perhaps the great trial of man, according to the biblical readings about the temptations of Christ in the desert (Lk 4,1-13) (see the painting by Ivan Kramskoi, sec. 19):
The devil then said to Jesus, “If you are the Son of God, command that this stone be changed into bread.” Jesus replied, “The Scripture says, ‘Man does not live by bread alone”.
And (afterward) I said to him: and I said to him: “I will give you all this power and all its glory, because all this has been handed over to me, and I can give it to anyone I want. Therefore, if you bow down before me in adoration, all this will be yours.”
Jesus replied, “The Scripture says, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.
And contempt for the power of evil and not accepting God: Then the devil took Jesus to Jerusalem, placed him on the highest part of the Temple and said to him: “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down! For Scripture says, ‘God will command his angels concerning you, to guard you carefully!’ And even more, ‘They will carry you in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’
But Jesus replied, “The Scripture says, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.
This must serve first of all for religious: not to put themselves in the place of God and then for all of humanity to avoid evil is to distribute bread, renounce human power and dominion while maintaining respect for the Other and respecting sanitary rules to avoid let the plague spread.
We cannot (as humanity) break through any of these temptations, but there is hope.
Ashes of a Wednesday
02
Mar
Christians all over the world celebrate Carnival Wednesday at the
beginning of Lent, the 40 days until Easter, there was no carnival but a feast of flesh and death which is the war in Eastern Europe, we implore the growing involvement of many countries do not create a 3rd. World War.
Several ucranian cities were razed and taken by Russian military forces, to the north the already declared people’s republics of the Donbass (Don River) region Luhansk and Donesk, and now to the south Mariupol and Kherson, in the north there is still resistance in the second largest city in the world. Kharkiv parents.
Russian troops, the biggest military convoy since the second world war, arrived in the vicinity of Kiev, the night there will be extreme fighting, a communication tower was torn down and a Holocaust memorial was hit, showing that the rhetoric of fighting neo-Nazism is just a pretext for war, Ukraine was also attacked by Hitler and the memorial reminded this, of course there are neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine as in many countries.
At the beginning of the pandemic when Easter could not be celebrated in public to avoid agglomerations, we say here that it was a significant Lent, perhaps this one with so many dead we should think no longer about the passion and death of Jesus, but about the agony of our civilization, in the networks the manifestations of hatred and “twisted” are widespread, yes there is any manifestations for peace.
It is also true that all over the world there are manifestations of solidarity for peace, a lot of welcome for refugees whose number can be surprising because a country is completely destroyed and Ukraine is not a small nation, it is one of the biggest countries in Europe, below Russia it is clear.
We can pause to think about our civilizational process in crisis, think about the mothers and children who lose their parents, relatives and friends in the war, the young people who will have no future, the countless deaths, on the Russian side alone there are already more than 6 thousand soldiers who did not return home.
On the ashes we will be able to build a new civilization, without submitting nations to despair and disgrace, without barbaric processes of colonization, including the cultural and, finally, we will be peoples who live in peace, who resolve conflicts at a negotiation table and look at children and old people with appreciation. .
May Ash Wednesday remind us that we are dust and that life has a sacred value.
Avoid the nuclear nightmare
01
Mar
The war in Ukraine is rising in tone and becoming a threat to all
humanity, on the battlefield the Ukrainians present a resistance and heroism that few believed, the pressures on Russia in the UN Security Council and in the UN itself increased, despite many abstentions, such as India and China, the tone is one of condemnation for the principles of sovereignty of nations, the economic sanctions imposed first on Russian millionaires and Putin himself, now for the entire Russian economy are already felt, in the battlefield only increased the tone, and the first attempt at dialogue failed, the issues of each side were enumerated and a next meeting.
The war has already produced an enormous scourge, there are more than 5 thousand Russian soldiers killed in battle and certainly the number of Ukrainians must be greater, in addition to the civilians who pay innocently for the war, there are more than half a million refugees and the entry of the European countries at war create a greater fear: nuclear weapons.
These weapons are in Russia’s exclave in Kaliningrad, a discontinuous territorial part of Russia that lies between Poland and Lithuania where long-range missiles were taken, but now all European airspace is closed to the Russians, as is the passage of the Black Sea. for the Mediterranean that Turkey has closed, this country is a member of the European Union, which begins to get involved militarily in the conflict and Putin’s threat of using nuclear weapons is for this case, analysts say is a bluff, but the risk exists .
A large Russian military convoy of more than 30 km of trucks transport troops, perhaps among them are the feared Chechens who are waging the pitched battle, and Putin’s once enemies now see him as a commander, of Islamic origin now has relative autonomy and depends from Russia.
All over the world and in Russia itself, there are protests calling for an end to the war, there they are harshly repressed, the role of Brazil in voting at the UN for the condemnation of Russia and neutrality in the OAS abstaining from the vote shows the ambiguous character, the cardboard of the president to have gone to visit Russia days before the war was a huge mistake, to say the least.
Brazil depends on fertilizers from Russia, Europe depends on gas and also on grains of which Ukraine is a major producer, the effects on the economy are already being felt: the Russian ruble has fallen by 30% and the dollar begins a fall that will probably not stop, in practice beyond the economy: food and fuel must rise in price vertically.
In the cyber field that Russia is a power, the Anonymous website declared its war, however the entry of Elon Musk (Tesla owner) into the war should be viewed with caution, the second war was a business for many entrepreneurs, even Vokswagem German and American Ford were successful in the post-war period .
Kiev may not fall, but it will be a miracle, the military aid from the West may have arrived late, the symbol that exists in the central square is the Archangel Michael is the angel of battles, for many Christians and Ukrainians are Christians of their own rite, but linked to Rome (incidentally, the Vatican proposed to mediate the dialogue), that the head of the heavenly army finds a now obscure path to peace, and does not allow a scourge and a nuclear night for humanity (in the picture the angel in Kiev’s Central Square).
Moving forward to true thinking
04
Feb
No thought is complete if it does not have a spirituality, what modernity
calls subjectivity but which is separate from objectivity as is typical of dualism, creates two realities and neither is part of the whole.
Contemplating the whole means considering the depth of our Being and understanding that we are part of an immense universe full of mysteries, and that our soul yearns for infinity and that is where a true spirituality walks, which is not separated from the substantiality of life (the which is called objectivity in modernity, which is just the part) and that without it we do not contemplate and live the whole, we live a segmented life.
To replace it with a small part, small vices and pleasures, is to walk in frivolity, in superficiality, no true asceticism does without a spirituality, and there is no spirituality without contemplating the human soul as part of the whole of our Being, thus surpassing anthropotechnics and to arrive at an onto-anthropotechnic that looks at things and also at the soul.
Many exercises, from the physical to the spiritual, are done seeking this asceticism, at this point Sloterdijk is right almost all of them are “despiritualized” but his explanation is incomplete because there is no eschatology in their spheres, this reasoning is done especially in Spheres II, which is the whole towards which we walk, it is possible to go to Him.
Yes, it is possible if we move towards deeper waters, seek the completeness of our substantiality, overcoming anthropocentrism and understanding the Earth and the Universe as our home, our abode, but mainly walking and casting the nets for deeper thoughts and spiritualities, there is at high sea, even if raging, what our soul longs for: the eternal.
The biblical passage Lk 5:4-5 says, right after Jesus taught the crowds and Peter (Simon) complained that they had not caught anything, Jesus answers him: “when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon: “Go into deeper waters, and cast your nets for fishing”, Simon replies that he worked all night and caught nothing, but obeyed and cast the nets.
The result was a great fishery. Here, the substantiality of the food and also the spirituality of advancing “to deeper waters” are worthy.
Different reactions to dominant thinking
03
Feb
In countries that were colonies of Europe, the term decolonization
emerged, which differs from decolonization because it penetrates precisely into the dominant thought and epistemology (some authors will call it epistemicide), which is not the simple liberation of domination, but also the resurgence of cultures. subalterns.
Thus, authors appeared in Africa (such as Achiles Mbembe), in Latin America (Aníbal Quijano and Rendón Rojas y Morán Reyes), as well as authors of original culture such as indigenous peoples (Davi Kopenawa and Airton Krenak), but a dialogue with European authors is possible. open to this perspective like Peter Sloterdijk (speaks of Europe as the Empire of the Center) and Boaventura Santos (speaks of epistemicide and also some concepts of decolonization), there are many others of course.
Christian culture must also be highlighted in these cultures, seen by many authors as a collaborator of colonialism, one cannot deny the historical perspective and also the doctrine that is the liberation of peoples and a culture of fraternity and solidarity, it is also a minority today in Europe and persecuted in many cases.
Among the Europeans who defend a new humanism, or a humanism in fact, since the Enlightenment and materialist theories failed to contemplate the human soul as a whole, and are therefore a one-legged humanism, among the Europeans I highlight Peter Sloterdijk and Edgar Morin, the first who defends the concept of community as a “protective shield” capable of saving our species, and the second, a planetary humanism, where man is a citizen of the world and diversities are respected.
Both consider the proposals populist, it is good to know that there are left and right, they must lose with the current crisis and global consumerism depends on an atmosphere of “frivolity” or superficiality that humanity will be forced to rethink, we will not go back to that what we consider stable, the original writers themselves, as Davi Krenak highlights in several interviews, what we want to return to was not good, there was no real happiness and well-being in what was considered normal.
As an aspect of the construction of thought, in Sloterdijk I highlight anthropotechnics, for him modernity was a de-verticalization of existence and a de-spiritualization of asceticism, while the knowledge and wisdom proposed in antiquity leave the empirical and the deceptive to go towards the eternal and of the true, as religion does not exist for him, it would be a movement of wisdom and knowledge, and not just an asceticism of exercises, where the immortal soul was exchanged for the body.
In Edgar Morin’s perspective, it is the hologrammatic perspective that can give man a vision of the whole, now fragmented by the specialization and particularity of each branch of science, a paradox of the complex system in which man is a part that must be integrated into the whole, where “not only the part is in the whole, but in which the whole is inscribed in the part”, the pandemic taught us this, but the lesson was still poorly learned, in the middle of the pandemic crisis it was decided that everything is released and there is no protocol for protection of all in each (each part), and there is no co-immunity.
Language and empathy
21
Jan
José Saramago expressed this about the opinion that people have
on different subjects: “The problem is not that people have opinions, this is great. The problem is that they have opinions without knowing what they are talking about”, in times of social media it is very common to repeat illustrious strangers because they said an impact phrase, but when it is placed in an appropriate context or if one penetrates the subject in question, one can have a more sensible opinion.
Everything is controversial today and in a way almost everything has become mere opinion, the doxa of the Greeks, in this context the problem of language is extrapolated and empathy is increasingly rare in everyday language, if the problem at the origin of modern society in classical antiquity was sophistry, everything was argued just to please the ruling power, the problem today is to see this disseminated in everyday language, care with language, respect for others and respectful listening must be part of empathic language.
It is not just central politics that has deteriorated, or democracy that has gone into crisis, the choices of savior leaders of the homeland, the little discussion of the de facto problems that affect the population, in full pandemic expansion little is said about effective measures against it. , just to give a serious example, the whole problem seems to be the vaccination of children, which is undoubtedly urgent, but everyone has several cases of family or close infection in the neighborhoods where they live.
Re-educating everyday language, reintroducing respect for any citizen, of any race, color or religion, should be a common effort to improve social empathy.
Even in religious language, previously extremely respectful and loving, a more separatist and isolationist conception seems to evolve where the different is isolated and frowned upon.
It is necessary to find space, time and place where the first truths can be spoken, where the original cultures can manifest and be heard.
In many cultures, religions and theories there is a central node there where the deepest truths are spoken.
The biblical passage in which Jesus reveals who he really is and what he came to should be the central point of analysis of his language and his mission, went to Nazareth, the city where he was raised and could be seen as an ordinary person, an empathic attitude, going the synagogue on the Sabbath day they gave the book of the prophet Isaiah (Is 61) and there he read: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor: he has sent me to proclaim the deliverance of the prisoners and, for the blind, the recovery of sight; to give freedom to the oppressed, he sent me to proclaim a year of favor from the Lord”, closed the book and then surprised everyone by saying: “Today this passage of Scripture that you have just heard has been fulfilled” (Lk 1:14). -21) (In the photo the signature of the prophet Isaiah, National Geographic).
Verbal, mixed and mystical language
20
Jan
Verbal language is one in which we find only words (it can be
primary, secondary or written orality), while non-verbal language involves gestures, visual signs, images, figures, drawings, photos, colors and even music, but communication can be realized beyond the gesture and then becomes a mystical communication.
It is not specific to religions, close people, lovers and even children can communicate with this perfection without the exclusive use of verbal or written language, it is beyond autosuggestion involves the theme that we develop further behind empathy, the vigor of a loving relationship or simply a great opening of the soul.
But the mystical language to make itself revealed to many and to be understood uses mythical resources, figures of speech, parables and even poetry, as Heidegger already thought who considered it an “other function” of language, the verses are rich in metaphors. , symbols and stories such as the passage of the Samaritan who helps a person who was robbed and attacked on the road to explain that helping the Other, mercy with those who suffer and helping is always a divine “will” for man.
However, it happens that many passages are read and analyzed out of context or out of the hermeneutic meaning of their realization, if in the past several linguistic resources were needed to read mystical documents, among them the Bible, the Quran or the book of Vedas, it does not mean that they can be read without the necessary hermeneutics.
Also updating them just to make political use, whatever the ideological tendency that makes it is a suspect hermeneutic because it depends on a certain historical conception, and we know that the sacred text, except for its contextual reading, must refer to a timeless and divine reality. aspatial (although the term does not exist), but considering the earthly life of everyone who reads it, it is on this that a good hermeneutic must be based.
The Bible does not mean anything other than what was written from a verbal word, the Christian gospels represent a review and a re-reading of the facts and verbal accounts of the early times of Christians that began with the public life of Jesus, period of domination of the Roman Empire and in which, besides him, many others claimed to be prophets.
The mystical language finds correspondence when a certain soul is in tune with the “divine will”, in the Christian saying, attentive to the Holy Spirit and having a special grace for this, which is very different from common influencers in our days due to the media powers and to the appeals to our human needs, one must be attentive to the divine, of course this is for those who believe, although also a perfect non-verbal communication can perfectly happen between those who do not believe, but it will be devoid of any divine revelation.
Empathy and the Truth
07
Jan
The construction of the concept of truth can roughly be divided
into three stages as having an elaboration or a narrative, I exclude the period of natural evolution of man because I consider the beginning of oral language elaborated by oracles/prophets/masters an important milestone, rather what existed was the natural man and his “search”, the three stages are: mythical, mixed orality (rhetoric and written) and written language based on Gutenberg’s press.
We are in a fourth stage that is called post-truth, therefore not its overcoming, but its crisis, the Enlightenment combined experience and Cartesian logic (Kantian is just the one that shows the limits of pure reason) and now we understand, it is one of the possibilities only philosophical phenomenology, the last step after Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer.
The hermeneutic circle presupposes what we argue in this week’s posts, a relationship with the Other, it proposes that there are always prejudices, that is, there are truths that may even have conventions, and recognize them even if they are different, being possible after these views a fusion of horizons, it is important and not secondary that Gadamer and Heidegger presuppose the existence of the text, that is, a written language which is a reference for the next step, which is listening to the Text, in orality however, it would be listening to the Other.
What we call post-truth then is the simple closure in an egoic truth, the transcendental ego, as developed in topic V of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, and which we summarized in the previous post, so it is impossible to merge horizons, logic prevails dualist and/or the idea of experience to establish a fact.
Ancient philosophy also had these embryonic ideas, Socrates affirmed (according to Plato): “The truth is not with men, but among men” and Aristotle affirmed that the truth is elaborated in the relation of the thing with its causes: Material cause: de what is the thing done? for example a built house. Efficient cause: what did the thing? Building with materials. Formal cause: what gives it form? The house itself. Final cause: what gave it shape? or the initial intention of the builder or architect
The difference between the phenomenological principle of addressing the “thing” and Aristotle is that its logic is dual: there is only A or no A, and from A to B it is necessary to go through intermediate C, in the fusion of origin a T is possible (The included third theory and quantum physics also admit this) that it is not A and not A, and one can go directly from A to B.
The Christian worldview establishes as truth the existence of a supernatural reality, above the dogmas and mysteries of science (they are themselves discovered are provisional truths) and there is an ontological criterion for the truth, a person, who is the earthly God its manifestation (epiphany), the man-God: Jesus.
John the Baptist, the last and greatest of the prophets, there are no prophets today unless a direct revelation from God Himself (thus all the prophets today are false) and John the Baptist when questioned in his time affirmed (Lk 3:16): “Hence, John declared to everyone: “I am baptizing you with water, but he who is stronger than I will come. I am not worthy of untying the strap of your sandals. He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit and in fire” ” and this is the truth of the Christian worldview.
Disempathy or untraining
05
Jan
Of course the term does not exist (disempathy), I created it to say
that it is neither antipathy nor disaffection, it is a feeling as great as the empathy that dominates the thoughts, culture and habits of a given time, as opposed to empathy, to develop the theme I take a phrase by Margareth Thatcher quoted in the film The Iron Lady (directed by Phyllida Lloyd, 2011).
In the film Margareth Thatcher, played by Meryl Streep (Oscar deserved for best actress) says: “Watch out for your thoughts they become words. Beware that they can become actions, as they become habits. Beware of habits because they become your character”, this to understand how it is possible to detrain neurons so that they are not empathetic and become obnoxious and destructive, unfortunately we are training the opposite side to our natural empathic side.
As we said in the previous post, it is possible to train empathy, it is possible to untrain it (another neologism, something natural that is corrupted by a habit opposite to the instinctive) and induce a feeling of repulsion and hatred, even if disguised or veiled and even disguised in a form of “love” that corrects the other, we must correct everything that is not agape or empathy, but rather, the others are habits or culture.
Let’s follow the path proposed by Thatcher according to the film that intends to be a biography (no, that was the main criticism), so things start with thinking, something must already be corrected right away in contemporary theories and ideologies that say that everything would begin by the “middle”, remember the discourse of contractualists, Thomas Hobbes do Leviathan (1651) indicates that man is wolf the man, that is, he is anti-empathic, whereas John Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690) defends that the individual must renounce the state of nature and make a contract (which the State regulates) and thus defends its freedom, his famous phrase: “where there is no law, there is no freedom” father of liberalism and in a way of empiricism (I think that it was born embryonic before with the vision of Francis Bacon).
Only Rousseau partly abandoned these concepts creating the “good savage”, the man is good society corrupts him, it is a principle of untraining, but he was also in favor of the contract, so it seems that handing freedom into the hands of the State is a condition “Natural”.
Thus, not only due to contractualism, but throughout the entire historical course, our thinking is linked to its contemporary roots and it is clear to what is within each culture, religion or ideological group, only through reading it is possible to detach from current thinking, and exercise to internalize takes the second step: the words.
Words like that are discourses or, as it is currently said, narratives, which are largely permeated in contemporary culture, only those who read are not linked to the flavor of this culture in its current polarization, remember that the first mental act is imitation (a neuroscience speaks of the mirror neuron), and it can be untrained, that is, it can either be taken back to its natural course of empathy or the opposite of what I have called disempathy.
It is from them that we unleash our actions, much has been said about reflection or active vitta as Hannah Arendt called it, and it was taken up by Byung Chull Han in his book The Society of Burnout, there he argues that we must also have an interior life, reflexive and so we can return to our initial course of empathy (my conclusion).
Finally, actions become habits, a good part of linguistics and semiotics starts the analysis from there, yes it is a fact that it also speaks of secondness (something that exists) and thirdness (what is), Pierce’s categories, but the theme is far and requires a greater depth which I humbly say I do not possess.
We come from habit to character, from the etymology of the word derives from the Greek “charaktér, éros”, or from the Latin “character, eris”, meaning “engraved”, therefore it is what is being carved, and it is possible to become a lack of empathy, that is, a break with the original empathic character, in the current discourse the absence of Subjectivity (proper to the subject), individualism (not looking at the Other) and a series of subcategories that are breaks with empathy.
