Arquivo para a ‘Noosfera’ Categoria
Act, potency and agape
15
Oct
What Aristotle defined as potency was conditioned to the act, so
the act is a current manifestation, in the example of the figure beside the seed), while potency is what could be (virtually, while virtú) the seed in potency is a tree could its manifestation as being to produce fruits and new seeds, while virtual, in the sense of virtue, is to transform it into a table or even a house.
Actual potential actualization is not just the seed that becomes a tree and bears fruit, the main source of change must be completely real and not only correspond to natural potentiality, but that which completes the rest, and this depended on Aristotle’s The first motor that gave meaning to everything, and that Thomas and Aquinas claims to be God, enters the question of conscience.
Here comes Logos or Pathos, since consciousness is always a dictate of reason and will, so for Thomas Aquinas Ethos depends essentially on human will and consciousness, while Logos leads us to a more primordial reason for Being , Pathos moves towards disordered passions and drives, while Logos should lead us to agape and balance.
Potency is thus characteristic of Being and Pathos its distortion, power seen as Pathos is authoritarian and passionate, while power as Ethos is ethical and agapic, in the sense of service done out of gratuitous love to those they are subordinate, so it can until there is asymmetry, but it will only be diversity and never authority in the sense of absolute power as it is united with the Logos.
It is not by chance that Aristotle was tutor of Alexander the Great, and his form of power spread to the peoples, as well as Plutarch in his text “Alexandre (in Parallel Lives”, 1st century): “After this battle of Issus… Macedonians form to take a liking to the other, silver and women, and the way of life of the Asians, becoming so fond of it that, as if dogs, they set out on the trail in search and pursuit of the opulence of the Persians”, is likely. which also influenced the Romans.
That’s how we reach the second war and the dangers of post-modernity, will we leave our childhood civilization and will one day be able to coexist with peoples with different cultures and cosmogonies, we seem to be heading in the opposite direction: polarization.
It was also no different for Jews and Christians, in the nascent community many wanted to have “power” alongside Jesus, in the reading of Mark (Mk 10:36-37) the apostles James and John make a special request to Jesus: “He he asked, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ They replied, ‘Let us sit one on your right and one on your left, when you are in your glory,’ and the master tells them they don’t know what they’re asking for.
Ai asks if they can drink from the cup that He will drink (referring to their type of death), they keep saying yes, then rebuke them and tell the form of power that exists in civilization (Mark 10: 42-43): “Jesus called them and said: ‘You know that the heads of the nations oppress them and the great ones tyrannize them. But among you, it must not be like that: whoever wants to be great, be your service and whoever wants to be first, be the slave of all”.
So those who govern believers in the same way as the temporal power have not yet understood the potency of the agapic Logos.
Will to power and civilizing childhood
14
Oct
A well-known concept of Nietzsche is the will to power, as a “natural”
driving force of man, we have already developed that the natural is different from the cultural, this being one of the infernal dichotomies as Latour said, the other is objectivity x subjectivity coming from rationalism/idealism of modernity.
In fact, this led people to expand from the primitive world, I would say in the infant civilizing age, the wars and empires of Alexander the Great, of which Aristotle was tutor, and later the Roman Empire, and the empires of modernity: the Portuguese, the French, Russian and American and the two world wars are in fact the great crisis of modernity, we were not able to overcome the civilizing childhood.
There were other great empires little mentioned in history: the great Manchu Qing dynasty of northern China invaded and defeated the Ming dynasty, it was a minority ethnicity but it dominated all of China and even had a brief restoration in 1917 and the great Mongol Empire was one of the largest in terms of area, reaching Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries.
One can think of potency as a form of growth to overcome both individual and civilizing childishness, so there is an act and potency, theorized Thomas Aquinas, but Nietzsche himself warns of this other sense: “the will to power is not even a being , not a becoming, it is a pathos”, so let us analyze the triad of classical antiquity: ethos, pathos and logos.
Pathos is in modern rationalism that also used by Descartes, in a different sense from Nietzsche from which the idea of pathology comes, which moves in imperfection, using Nietzsche’s own idea is not ontological, it denies being because it does not even ethos and nor the classic triad logos.
In Aristotelian rhetoric, ethos is one of the modes of persuasion or components of an argument, and this one gives meaning to being, being the link with the Logos that gives meaning to Being, giving credibility and establishing a truth that is not reality, because that is where the Logos draws the consistency of Being to oppose the Pathos-logical.
The Pathos lives in pure emotion, in irrationality, in deceitful imagination, he is responsible for the disorders of the Being, being in a way its denial.
The Pathology of two world wars has shown that humanity has not left its civilizing infancy, it is still a victim of itself incapable of conceiving Being as Ethos.
A different view of inequality
05
Oct
Speaking of simple and wise people cannot exclude poor people
either.
In September, the book by Abhijit V. Baneriee and Esther Doflo was published in Brazil. They seek to understand the specific problems that arise from poverty and find solutions around the choices that people in these conditions make.
They went to villages, slums and asked questions, collected data and listened to history. The Economy of the Poor (Zahar, 2021) seeks to present a coherent narrative with the stories and options of people in extreme poverty to get out of their current condition. , it may seem small or meaningless, but it restores human dignity and the right of choice for these people.
Government policies and solidarity actions fail, as the authors think, because they are based on clichés and mistaken assumptions, the worst of which is to consider them inferior.
Changing expectations and preconceptions about these people is no simple task, concrete examples and successful experiences made with patience and willingness to learn from these people can make more significant progress in combating poverty.
In 2019, together with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, Abhijit received the Nobel Prize in Economics, and in another work also addressed with Esther Duflo “Good economy for difficult times” (Zahar, 2020) where, in addition to inequality, it deals with problems such as deceleration of the growth, climate change, work automation, income distribution and artificial intelligence.
Thomas Pickety, author renowned for updating the question of Capital for our time, said of these authors: “Not all economists wear ties and think like bankers. Banerjee and Duflo unravel new research, challenge conventional views on issues ranging from commerce to high-income taxation and social mobility and offer avenues to address them.”
It is worth looking at this new perspective, still little known in Brazil.
Reification, objects and subjects
22
Sep
If on the one hand it is true that there is in the dominant
idealist/enlightenment mentality a complete reification of life (the life that projects itself on the thing, res-thing), on the other hand the separation of subject and objects creates a dualism in which nature and objects that are part of life are ignored.
The so-called subject-object dualism is explained by Edgar Morin as follows: “the concept of system can only be constructed in the object/subject transaction and not in the elimination of one by the other.” (MORIN, 1977, p. 136).
Morin will explain that both “naive realism” and “naive nominalism” (antagonistic currents since the medieval period) eliminate the subject, in nominalism the ideal system is one that does not have the subject, and in realism the ideal object is the system .
But the object “whether ‘real’ or ideal, is also an object that depends on a subject” (Morin, idem), and through the systemic way “the observer, excluded from classical science, the subject, stripped and thrown into the cans of garbage of metaphysics, they return to the fulcrum of the physis” (MORIN, ibidem).
Morin observes that the observer and the physis (Nature, with N) are confined in terms of a system, and proposes a new systemic totality “is constituted by associating the observer-system and the observer-system can, from there, become a metasystem in relation to one and the other, if it is possible to find the metapoint of view, which allows the observation of the whole constituted by the observer and his observation” (MORIN, 1977, p. 137).
He explains that one can, in a maximal simplifying view, reduce both the importance of the observer and the physis, “creating a supersystem, whose theory reveals the autonomous phenomenal systems”, it is good to clarify here that it is not a question of phenomenology but of a ” suprasystem” which has the characteristic of an autonomous phenomenon, is not the eidetic reduction.
The second meaning of the metapoint of view, “the ideological, cultural and social character of the theoretical system (the theory of systems) in which the conception of a physical system is inscribed” is emphasized (idem).
We cannot escape from this elaboration of the key epistemological problem: “the systemic articulation established between the anthroposocial universe and the physical universe, via the concept of system, suggests to us that an organizational character is fundamentally common to all systems” (MORIN, 1977 , p. 137).
Although there is talk of life linked to objects, in philosophy of the reification (or reification) of life, the dualistic mentality of separation between subjects and objects crystallizes and enlivens this in everyday life.
MORIN, E. (1977) The nature of NATURE. Lisbon PUBLICATIONS EUROPA-AMERICA, LDA.
Order, disorder and dialogue
17
Sep
Understanding the process of complexification of nature also
means understanding that it is man and that it actually means humanism forgotten in traditional idealist and positivist schemes.
Thus for Edgar Morin (2001), the paradigmatic issue goes beyond the simple understanding of the theory of science (epistemology or methodology), as it involves the questioning of the frameworks of knowledge we have (gnoseology and what we think is reality) and more Deep ontology (what is the nature of reality), these principles govern the phenomenon of what we know and cannot be separated from physical, biological and anthropo-sociological systems.
It is an open reason, not irrationalism or relativism, but based on the idea that an evolutionary, complex and dialogical knowledge can be built, in which disorder is a part.
Systems develop in a process of entropy, but it is negentropy (the denial of entropy at each stage of evolution) that makes self-organization a living and evolving system.
It defines it as a body that develops and expands, entropy, dispersion and crisis appear in the original organization, but negentropy means new self-organization and if we look at man within it, within nature and in its evolutionary aspect, it returns question of a supernatural order, because it was precisely the opposite path that denied this transcendence.
When the repudiation of naturalism won and took hold, the humanist myth of the supernatural man became the very center of anthropology (and of all other sciences) and the oppositions nature-culture, man-animal, culture-nature took shape. of paradigm.
Of course, the role of man in nature depends on the worldview, animists for example, all non-human realities also have supernatural power, others stand out a God also human as in Christianity (created in the image and likeness of God) and others an ascesis that we are at one end of the scale of evolution (complexity), the Hindu and Eastern religions.
In Christianity, last week we reflected Jesus’ question to the disciples, “Who do they say I am?” and he prepared them for death, for the “disorder” of his death, even though the disciples still understood they wanted to dispute the power, position and positions they would occupy in the ascesis, and Jesus, seeing what they said, will give them a harsh sentence (Mk 9,35): “If anyone wants to be the first, let him be the last of all and the one who serves all!”, do you understand today?.
What is natural and the possibility of knowing
16
Sep
The problem of knowing the world (natural and not 
cultural, this is what we have) must start from a premise of clearing our minds of cultural convictions, most of them idealistic, that blind us to the possibility of understanding that we do not dominate nature as proposed the Enlightenment, and worse, we run the risk of destroying it and putting civilization in check.
Quoting Edgar Morin in the epigraph of his first chapter of the book “The Nature of Nature”, I write the second in capital letters even to deify it in the sense that it is still unknown to us, and contains mystery that affects us, as proved by the current Pandemic that still challenges us.
Edgar Morin, opening the first chapter: “The Spirit of the Valley”, quotes Karl Popper: “Personally I think there is at least one problem… that interests all thinking men: the problem of understanding the world, ourselves and our knowledge as part of the world”, so this knowledge is neither definitive nor eternal, as everything evolves and is perishable.
To introduce these convictions, he makes a second quote by Jacob Bronowski: “The concept of science is neither absolute nor eternal”, and he will make a third, which is for the next post.
He begins with 5 convictions that made him start this book and where is his “cogito” his suspension of judgment of everything he thought before, his first conviction of these problems states that he: “holds us to the present, they demand that we let go of it to consider them in depth” (Morin, 1973, pg. 13), and professes his second conviction: “the principles of knowledge hide what, henceforth, it is vital to know” (idem) thus detaches himself from his previous ideas.
His third conviction is the strongest, increasingly convinced that the relationship science Ʌ politics, Ʌ ideology when it is not invisible, continues to be treated in an indigent way, through the reabsorption of two of its terms in one of them that has become dominant” (idem) , gives you food for thought.
His fourth conviction is that “that the concepts we use to conceive our society — the whole society — are mutilated and lead to inevitably mutilating actions” (idem).
Finally, his fifth conviction is: “that anthroposocial science must be articulated in the science of nature, and that this articulation requires a reorganization of the structure of knowledge itself” (Idem), so the knowledge we have needs to be modified to from its bases.
He knew that his task was really encyclopedic and vast, that’s why he even isolated himself in a castle (I don’t have the precise data) because his task: “I myself needed exceptional circumstances and conditions’ to move from conviction to action, that is, to work” (idem).
And it is from there that he wrote his complex method with three initial questions: “What does the radical self of self-organization mean? • What is the organization? • What is the complexity?” (page 14).
MORIN, E. The nature of NATURE. Lisbon PUBLICATIONS EUROPA-AMERICA, LDA., 1973.
What is natural and the possibility of knowing
15
Sep
The problem of knowing the world (natural and not cultural,
this is what we have) must start from a premise of clearing our minds of cultural convictions, most of them idealistic, that blind us to the possibility of understanding that we do not dominate nature as proposed the Enlightenment, and worse, we run the risk of destroying it and putting civilization in check.
Quoting Edgar Morin in the epigraph of his general introduction of the book “The Nature of NATURE”, he write the second in capital letters even to deify it in the sense that it is still unknown to us, and contains mystery that affects us, as proved by the current Pandemic that still challenges us.
Edgar Morin, opening the first chapter: “The Spirit of the Valley”, quotes Karl Popper: “Personally I think there is at least one problem… that interests all thinking men: the problem of understanding the world, ourselves and our knowledge as part of the world”, so this knowledge is neither definitive nor eternal, as everything evolves and is perishable.
To introduce these convictions, he makes a second quote by Jacob Bronowski: “The concept of science is neither absolute nor eternal”, and he will make a third, which is for the next post.
He begins with 5 convictions that made him start this book and where is his “cogito” his suspension of judgment of everything he thought before, his first conviction of these problems states that he: “holds us to the present, they demand that we let go of it to consider them in depth” (Morin, 1977, pg. 13), and professes his second conviction: “the principles of knowledge hide what, henceforth, it is vital to know” (idem) thus detaches himself from his previous ideas.
His third conviction is the strongest, increasingly convinced that the relationship science Ʌ politics Ʌ ideology [Ʌ in text it´s triangle] when it is not invisible, continues to be treated in an indigent way, through the reabsorption of two of its terms in one of them that has become dominant” (idem) , gives you food for thought.
His fourth conviction is that “that the concepts we use to conceive our society — the whole society — are mutilated and lead to inevitably mutilating actions” (idem).
Finally, his fifth conviction is: “that anthroposocial science must be articulated in the science of nature, and that this articulation requires a reorganization of the structure of knowledge itself” (Idem), so the knowledge we have needs to be modified to from its bases.
He knew that his task was really encyclopedic and vast, that’s why he even isolated himself in a castle (I don’t have the precise data) because his task: “I myself needed exceptional circumstances and conditions’ to move from conviction to action, that is, to work” (idem).
And it is from there that he wrote his complex method with three initial questions: “What does the radical self of self-organization mean? • What is the organization? • What is the complexity?” (page 14).
MORIN, E. The nature of NATURE. Lisbon PUBLICATIONS EUROPA-AMERICA, LDA., 1977.
Between the natural and the Supernatural
10
Sep
The soul (anima in its original Greco-Latin version) was studied by 
almost all ancient philosophers, it can be summarized from the Latin “anima mundi” (soul of the world) as a cosmological concept of a ruling force of the universe by which the divine becomes manifested in laws that affect matter, or in the hypothesis of an immaterial force, as something inseparable from matter, is in Plato in the books The Republic and Timaeus.
Marsilio Vicino, Renaissance humanist, who wrote a Platonic Theology, defined it as “The soul can be called the center of nature, the intermediary of all things, the current of the world, the essence of everything, the knot and union of the world” , whatever the concept, it is a part of the natural that may have manifestations unknown to current science, and that is why it is supernatural.
But the natural that man seemed to dominate from the Enlightenment, revealed to the few more mysterious than imagined, at the beginning of the century the uncertainty principle gave rise to quantum physics and a tiny virus challenges us, and we have not overcome it, the relaxation can provoke a new crisis, like a poorly cured patient who wants to do activities that the disease does not allow.
In his book The Nature of Nature, not by chance his first book on his method of complexity, Edgar Morin will describe the Dasein of nature (from physis) as: “All systems, even those we abstractly and arbitrarily isolate from sets of which they are part (like the atom, which is moreover a partially ideal object, or like the molecule), they are necessarily rooted in the physis” (Morin, 1977, p. 133), and quoting Lupasco (creator of the idea of the included third party, state between being and non-being of matter): “A system can only be energetic” (idem).
Energy, complexity and mystery is therefore a characteristic of nature, and we have discovered over the last century that uncertainty must not only be part of a truly scientific method, its absence can lead to dogma and obscurantism.
How the supernatural manifests itself then depends on the cosmovision of each culture, without being confused with it, as it has a unique meaning within the eschatology that sees it, the beginning and end of everything, of the universe and its enigmas.
In Christian culture, the supernatural is present in the human revelation of a God who makes himself small, and the human condition is reduced to take him to the coming of eternity. Jesus forbade the apostles to speak openly about his divinity, but he questioned them (Mk 8.27-29):
“Who do men say that I am?”. They replied, “some say you are John the Baptist, some say you are Elijah, some say you are one of the prophets.” Then he asked: “And you, who do you say that I am?” Peter replied, “You are the Messiah.”
He talked separately with the disciples and was going to explain the kind of death he was going to die.
MORIN, E. THE METHOD 1. A natureza da NATUREZA (The nature of NATURE). Portugal: Europe-America Editions, 1977.
The natural and the cultural
09
Sep
The word naturalization is widely used at this time in history, 
and so this idea of the natural that permeates Western culture since classical antiquity is explained here, which actually exists is a dichotomy between culture and the natural.
The renaissance was a great movement of transformation in Western culture, the universe became infinite, new lands and new peoples entered the history of the Old World and this climate put everything in discussion, Italian humanism was one of these stages of historical movements, we quote Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Vicino and their works, but Dante Aligheri is more cited.
Dante’s Ulysses will cross the Pillars of Hercules of scientific knowledge, philosophy, technique, mathematics, arts and letters, challenging previous dogmas, but physics and the domain of nature are placed on opposite sides, although the Copernican Revolution is the great symbol of this turn, it will be the domain of nature that will develop in the next moment.
The idea of limitlessness, predictability, and certainties accompanied the philosophy of modernity until the advent of quantum physics, while science sought the domain of the natural, and we now see the consequences of this domain on the planet in ecological crisis, point physics The beginning of the Copernican revolution continued to move towards the mystery of particles to atomic subparticles, from harmonic universe to chaos with black holes, with worm paths that contradict absolute time.
The uncertainties reached science, and Edgar Morin recalls that one of the consequences of the current pandemic in an interview stated: “We do not know the political, economic, national and planetary consequences of the restrictions caused by the confinements. We don’t know whether to expect the worst, the best, or both mixed up: we are heading towards new uncertainties”, and this is the future.
The naturalization of historical contexts (race, ethnicity and sexism, for example), is actually a culturalization (although the term does not exist), and the so-called scientific epistemologies were important for this, mainly from a historical point of view, where they were transformed into culture because they were not natural and not even real, but versions of history.
The planet, society and civilization are asking for a truce, and we do not know if it will be possible to deliver it, the climate is increasingly tense, and a consequence that we did not expect from the pandemic (which should push us towards solidarity) is that we are more divided than before, the truce will be difficult.
Humanism and the natural
08
Sep
We have difficulty in understanding what is really natural and what is cultural, the naturalist view of pre-Socratic philosophy already anticipated a web of laws and interpretations of the material world, not exactly giving the configuration of what Being was, it was in this space that it developed the idea of the subject as dual of the object, so subjectivity is not seen as cultural, but natural.
Heraclitus’ scarce references, what remains of him are just a few maxims as you cannot cross the same river twice, the idea of becoming and fire as a primordial element in nature, hide a search for human identity with a prevailing objectivist tone , was the path opened by Socrates to themes as important today as interiority and conscience.
Moral conscience was only resumed within the scope of Christianity, leaving aside Plato and Aristotle, who elaborated the idea of the immobile engine (the principle of the whole universe and thus of nature) but separated from the world of ideas, where “naturalistic” ideas developed , did not postulate a regnum hominis, a kingdom of man, of course there will be other readings from this period.
What encouraged me was Karl Popper’s description of The World of Parmenides as a period of the genesis of the Enlightenment, the Greek physis is nothing but nature, so it can be said as more property that physicalist naturalism begins there. , an extension of the perception that the human subject has its interiority linked to the living environment, and therefore cultural, an understanding of the individual or collective macrocosm (of cultural groups) is then linked to the idea of nature without a broader cosmovision being contemplated.
To this question there is another one, about the emergence of the subject canceling the Being, which is freedom, subject is only as action, that is, as a function of the object, interiority is then a problematic part of an individual or collective subjectivism, and not a freedom of choice over which it manifests itself.
If man in his universe can only submit to the laws, to his destiny, he is not free, there is no place for autonomy, and in a broader sense he is subject to fatalism, in Aristotle a one-dimensional concept of freedom is traced. It, as a free being, is one who has himself as an end and who is not subject to menial work, is defined, therefore, around the polis, and its laws.
If the anthropocentric concept is revisited today, it is important to understand its Greek roots.
The Renaissance philosophy will develop a humanism, as the man at the center of all speculation, being a creature of the world he enjoys, however, a unique and very exceptional situation, I highlight Nicolau de Cusa, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola.
Ficino is the least known, born in Figlini Valdarno (1433) and the greatest representative of Renaissance Fiorentine humanism, and revisits the works of Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry and Proclus.
Perhaps the reason for being little known may be due to the fact that he became a priest and wrote the Theologia Platonica (1482), a work that makes a dialogue with Plato’s conception of religion and the Neoplatonists.
