
Arquivo para a ‘Noosfera’ Categoria
From language to being
Language as speech and rhetoric is just what is externalized, but if thought of as ontology, it is the opening (Erschlossenheit) from the silent appropriation of the self, as Heidegger thought of Being and Time, whether the opening (offenheit) is thought of as clearing of being (lichtung des Seins), the one used by thinkers and poets, and which shows itself in the measure of its silent correspondence as being, expressed in Letter on Humanism.
In this text, he writes: “Destiny appropriates itself as a clearing of the Being, which it is, as a clearing. It is the clearing that grants the being’s proximity. In this proximity, in the clearing of Da Lugar, the man lives as a former caretaker, without him being able to experience and assume that dwelling today” (Heidegger, 1967, p. 61)
In general terms, language is a vehicle for the expression of something internal to man, that is, a bridge that links the inside and outside of man, such a way of speaking is thought of as an activity that takes place in which man is the very medium, that’s why there is silence before.
But according to the ontological conception of language, it is not language that belongs to man, but rather man himself conceived ontologically as a resolute being-toward-death or ontologically being that responds as mortal to the silent request of Being.
In more simplistic terms, this is the difference between the being that “has” a language, in the sense of the ability to speak, and the ontological conception that thinks man as “being” through being possessed of the ability to speak, the language here is not just the transmission of information, but the way in which human existence itself manifests.
In this context, communication begins with silence, an emptiness is needed, an epoché in communication, which presupposes an Other who will be a recipient, is not thus a receiver, but a destination of his speech, and this is the way in which human existence itself manifests. .
Thus for Heidegger, but also for Niklas Luhmann, it would be necessary to review the entire theory of Communication, since receiver and transmitter are themselves the non-human environment, and do not “replace” man, they cannot exist or have a relationship as if If man were something accessory, there is all the hallucination of the current Artificial Intelligence, putting receiver and transmitter in the place of source and destination, it would be necessary to foresee a “clearing” of the being “outside” of Being
For this reason, the clearing is internal, we have already posted in another opportunity what Heidegger affirms in his magnum work Being and Time: “Insofar as the being is in force from the aletheia, the self-unveiling emerging belongs to him. We call this the action of self-enlightenment and enlightenment, the clearing” (cf. Being and Time).
HEIDEGGER, Martin. Carta sobre o Humanismo (Letter on humanism). Brazil, Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, 1967, p. 61.
The hermeneutic circle and the metaphor
We are betrayed when we think we know and we are still in the initial stage of interpretation, the one that has not yet started a period process, to put our preconceptions in parentheses and start a real dialogue.
Metaphor helps us to bring, using poetic language, a relationship of belonging, to bring the world to poetry and to bring poetry to the world, because the poem projects a world in its ontological dimension, a reality that lies between the seeing as of the metaphor itself to be.
In addition to this function in the scope of semantic innovation, the unveiling of deeper reality, for example, explaining issues that are complex in order to allow this belonging, this proximity, is the function, for example, of parables, metonymy and synecdoche.
Examples of more marked parables are the biblical ones, associating the Kingdom of God with seeds that grow unnoticed, or with the mustard seed, a tiny seed that becomes a tree, this to say that there is a life-giving force in man, and in all men.
However, metaphor, through the use of figurative language, always runs the risk of remaining on the surface.
We exemplified last week the biblical passage in which Jesus went to the seaside work of Galilee and a threat threatens the boat and Jesus calms the storm (Mark 4: 35-41), but the subtlety of this passage is the metaphorical meanings of going the other bank and the storm itself.
Needed to explain deeper things and questioned the disciples fear of storms, and goes to the other side, meaning a more direct moment with the apostles, much of the analytical exegesis (see previous post) is fixed on an immediate understanding that go to the other shore means changing the route, when in fact beyond resting (Jesus slept in the storm), as deeper realities were explained directly to the apostles.
This is proven if we verify that later Jesus returns “to the other bank” where he again encounters a crowd (Mk 5:21-43), and in this crowd he is beyond an unknown woman who touches the master’s robe and is cured of a hemorrhage of 12 years old, there is a synagogue chief named Jairus.
Jairus had the daughter in the last few years, and while he was with Jesus he asked him to lay hands on his daughter, friends of Jairus arrived, who said that she died and Jesus says that she “only sleeps”, goes to Jairus’ house and performs the miracle pronouncing the words “Talitá cum”, the girl gets up.
This subtlety, an ordinary person and a synagogue leader, shows very clearly that in the “crowd” there are also religious authorities who want signs (the Jews want signs and the Greeks wisdom) and so the metaphor is complemented with “signs” and a “wisdom” inherent in Jesus.
The language as plurality
The problem of interpretation when we are thinking about language appears as a demonstrative proposition, it occurs when such an interpretation becomes unique and true, Heidegger’s proposal is one of the possibilities of language, but not the only or the main one, when we deal only with logic it does not understand the plurality of language.
This is present in what today is called narrative or discourse, we have already dealt with in several posts when we deal with Paul Ricoeur’s Living Metaphor, but here the issue is ontological: Being.
Science and technique, as well as the ideological narrative does not even touch the essential problem of the question of being, it is focused on what is called natural science or nature:
“natural science can only observe man as something simply present in nature (…) within this scientific-natural project we can only see him as a natural being, that is, we intend to determine the being-man through a method which was absolutely not projected in relation to its peculiar essence” (Heidegger, 2001, p. 53).
This is the reverie of tradition in the conception of language and truth, the one that brings the notion of finitude of being: being is time, for example, accelerating time we think of accelerating being, when in fact it is what causes its emptying , a common theme of the Heideggerians.
We separate the ontological Being from the existential, quoting Heidegger himself, because the analytic falls into another trap which is to link the being to the subject, copula and attribute, creating a structural possibility of language. It is tempting precisely because of its analytic composition, but deep down it is essentially logical and not ontological, Being escapes it.
Such evasion was already foreseen by Heidegger: “the essence of being in its multiplicity can never, in general, be collected from the copula and its meanings” (HEIDEGGER, 2003, p.391).
Language carries its own hermeneutic relationship. Heidegger, based on Being and Time, relocates the question of understanding and the search for truth, which was placed in the scope of the theory of knowledge, and launches it into the existential plane. In this way, the hermeneutic circle emerges, not tied to mere opinion or to functional logicism, nor to the analytic.
Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology brings to light the notion of logos as unveiling, highlighting their belonging to language as the place where the human inhabits, in its finiteness.
HEIDEGGER, M.(2001) Seminário de Zollikon Petrópolis: Vozes.
HEIDEGGER, M. (2003) Os conceitos fundamentais da Metafísica: mundo, finitude, solidão. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária.
The knowledge and doing
The society we live in is a performance society, as Byung Chul Han calls it, who did his doctorate at Heidegger, it is a society of doing, but not of knowing how to do.
Remembering “old theorists”, deifying ancient theories that had a determined temporal functioning, constitutes the setback and crisis of philosophy, not of thought, because man as a Being is capable of unveiling and discovering, because there is a forgetfulness of being.
Knowledge not closed in logic, with openness and possibility of new discoveries is the constitutive movement of time, there is not something fully understood and finished, it is constitutive of what happens in time, and it is subject to history, it is knowledge practical and of life, a Lebenswelt as Husserl called him.
Heidegger started from there with the direct influence of Husserl, the meaning of his Phenomenology supposes this opening for seeing things as they manifest themselves, the principle of knowledge.
Thus, there is not something understood, finished, what there is is a comprehensibility in a constant becoming, implying practical knowledge, a know-how that is more than the objective of science, it must be the foundation of every comprehensive act as one that seeks to know.
The essential opening is not for the hermeneutic consciousness as seen by Heidegger a primarily rational act, it is an affective disposition, one of the structural existences of the being-there, it is shown that understanding is always an affective understanding, in the sense of “affecting”.
Interpretation follows affection, but what is interpreting here if not revisions and elaborations of meaning, set in motion, thus interpretation is for Heidegger:
“The interpretation of something as something is essentially based on having-prior, seeing-prior and concept-prior. Interpretation is never an unassuming apprehension of something previously given […]” (HEIDEGGER, 2014, p. 427).
One of Heidegger’s central philosophical problems is the question about the possibilities of language, it is from this that the Being elaborates its worldview, from which it cannot escape, it enables us to understand the world, it elaborates the being-in -world.
Being in the world that would imply know-how depends on the worldview, impoverished and obscured by performance, the demand for efficiency and poor articulation with time.
HEIDEGGER, M. Ser e tempo (Being and time) Translation, organization, previous note, attachments and notes by Fausto Castilho. Campinas, SP: Publisher of Unicamp; Petrópolis, RJ: Editora Vozes, 2014.
The anguish, the finite being and the fear
Anxiety, as an essential category, is the most significant temporal fact of our existence, the fact that man has an end, that he dies and his existence ends, it is from there that Heidegger works on another concept which is the being-for- the-death [Sein-zum-tode].
Thus death is a limitation of the original unity of being-there, and it means human transcendence, the power-being, which contains a possibility of non-being, but here only as negation, “the end” of being-in-the-world it is death, this end limits the power-being, which is its existence, and limits the possible totality of Dasein (1989, vol. II, p. 12)
It is possible to separate fear from strong fear, leaving the first within the limits of the finite, and fear outside these limits, what the human imagination penetrates and projects as not being, beyond being-to-death, a being-for -beyond death is strong fear.
Byung Chul Han warns that like positivity, negativity is also dangerous: “it is defined by the negativity of prohibition. The modal verb that governs it is the ‘cannot’ (…) The society of performance, increasingly, is in the process of discarding negativity. Growing deregulation is abolishing this. The unlimited ‘power’ is the positive modal verb of the society of conquest (…) prohibitions, commands and laws are replaced by projects, initiatives and motivation. The society of discipline is still governed by the ‘no’. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, the performance society creates depressives and losers.”
Thus, it is possible to think of negativity as an important process, although it generates fear, and from it generate a process of fear, which, far from denying the prohibitions, demonstrates that they can lead us to broader results than those promised by performance, is the beyond-being.
Neither the transcendence of idealism that is mere projection of being onto the object, the so-called subjectivism, nor being-to-death as a fatal transcendence, but a fear produced by negativity that leads us to recognize limits, such as those that were imposed in the Pandemic and that do not generate death, nor are confused with the negationism that is the modal positive, denying that human life needs limits in dangerous situations.
The reading of the Bible of Apostle Mark (Mk 4,35-41), can, in this context of fear, reveal new things about being, the reading says that “when dismissing the crowds”, Jesus went with the disciples “to the other shore”, I would say far from the being-there of the pure positivity of being-in-the-world, the boat faces a strong wind and strong waves begin to fill the boat, fear takes over the disciples, they strong fear for death and they say to the master “we are perishing”, the Master says to the wind and the sea: “shut up”.
It isnt magic or a simple demonstration of power, the phrase spoken by Jesus explains a lot: “Why are you so afraid? Do you still not have faith?”, but they still felt “a great fear”, it is the anguish.
The metaphor and the ineffable
The epistemological challenge is pointed out by Paul Ricoeur of accepting the discovery model, since to reject it “or to reduce it to a provisional experience, which replaces, in the absence of a better one, direct deduction, is to reduce the very logic of discovery to a deductive procedure” (p. 369).
In this context, we highlight the function of the parable that creates a scene that bridges the ineffable and the reality it re-describes, it introduces a plot that produces something beyond the everyday, the parabolic utterance is also metaphorical in this sense.
Like describing a future reality that hasn’t happened yet, the logic has been to re-describe reality using rhetoric, which explores only present reality and denies utopia and fiction.
Ricoeur thus defines the parable as the conjunction of a narrative form and a metaphorical process and also means the narrative of a short fictional story with the aim of interpreting something else that according to the narrator is preferable, in order to interpret it well, to leave it in the sense of the metaphorical.
Future realities that cannot thus simply be described or deduced because they did not actually happen, what will our post-pandemic reality be, what will the human future be like.
Many authors try to unravel this ineffable reality, but it is not deductible, it is a “bridge”.
When explaining the divine realities in the Bible, because Jesus said it was ineffable, he compares it to different situations using a parable, he says in Chapter 4 of the Gospel of Mark (Mark 4:26-27: “Jesus told the crowd: “The Kingdom of God is like when someone scatters the seed on the earth. He goes to sleep and wakes up, night and day, and the seed goes on germinating and growing, but he doesn’t know how it happens…”, compares with the harvest and a tiny seed that is the mustard.
Thus to describe these realities only by logic and deduction is to ignore both the discovery of reality itself and to falsify, for a scientific path, as the divine realities, a tiny seed becomes a beautiful and leafy tree, and this also happens in history
Close your eyes
It could be the other way around, but the reality is so frightening that it will only be possible to see the one who has concluded the courage to do what seems insane right now, look inside and see how much he collaborates with this very harsh reality.
The diagnosis came to me unexpectedly while I asked what is eternity and where I want humanity to go, I had the intuition that everything should change starting with me, and knowing the new book by Byung Chul Han some answers were there, I received the book in two days and I can already comment on it.
The intuition was based on what many already know: the great utopias and the great speeches collapsed and the obvious question was then where will we go.
Chul Han’s clues are inspiring, without the book’s subtitle: “Please close your eyes: in search of another time”, edition now from 2021 by the publisher Vos, the essay is from 2013.
One might think that we live in a time of acceleration, but Chul Han points out that “narratives do not allow themselves to be arbitrarily accelerated, acceleration destroys their own structures of meaning and time, the disturbing thing about the experience of current time is not the acceleration as such, but the conclusion of the missing beat”, that is, the lack of rhythm and beat.
The completion of things from the practice of new lives, the rites that cause things to be done with rhythm and pace to get things done well and reach their conclusion.
The acceleration has its cause in the universal incapacity to close, time keeps rushing forward, because it doesn’t reach the closure anywhere.” (p. 20)
That’s how I inverted my diagnosis, the end of utopias and great ideals (in the sense of eidos and not idealism), did not happen not for lack of speech or “good intentions” but for lack of conclusion.
But it is important, consistent with Chul Han’s speech, to review the impact on people, on their internal integrity of doing an experiment to the end, and Chul Han will touch on another term.
It will touch on a taboo theme of death, present now during a pandemic, “and in a world in which the conclusion and closure give way to an endless and directionless advance, it is not possible to die because dying also means presupposing the ability to end the life” (p. 29-30), understand that life is a cycle.
He also speaks of the performance subject, the one who seeks the maximum “the performance subject is incapable of reaching a conclusion”, and this leads to overcharging themselves and not concluding.
Understand that we are at the end of a cycle and if we don’t understand this well, “it has to end [ver-enden] at an inopportune time [Unzeit]” (p. 30), for this not to happen it is necessary to close your eyes and see yourself.
Han, Byung-Chul (2021). Favor fechar os olhos: em busca de um outro tem
Action without reflection, the “active” life
When criticizing the “Society of tiredness”, the efficientism that Byung Chul Han takes up in his last book, in the following post we will comment, both point the finger at activism, or the word that Sloterdijk likes: “agitationism”.
The notion of praxis that Sloterdijk defends is not the notion of praxis as an act that considers the central myth of modernity – “agitationism”, which is, at bottom, just an inversion of poesis and theory – but as a “letting go -flow”, a type of active contemplation.
To demystify this notion of praxis as a necessary correlate of action-reason, practical philosophy would have to become aware that it allowed itself to be deluded by the myth of action and that its alliance with constructivism and activism prevented it from realizing that the The highest concept of behavior is not action, but letting it happen, being able to let go of the things that pass you by and act through you, in order to be more faithful to the author’s words.
To understand what he means by Critique of Cynic Reason, one of his most hermetic works, he differentiates classical from modern cynicism, which comes from the origin of the guild term “kŷőn”, from modern cynicism that has become an “enlightened false consciousness”.
The Enlightenment assumed that one lived in darkness where evil was practiced, but that this evil would be the result of ignorance, so its attempt to illuminate those lacking the light of reason, but this created a “false consciousness”, a distorted view of reality,
The Enlightenment presupposed darkness where evil was practiced, which was seen as the fruit of ignorance. Criticism tried to illuminate the dens devoid of the light of reason. Hence the basic concept of ideology as “false consciousness”, as a distorted and therefore false view of reality, and so that you don’t think that this is just philosophy, the “engaged” thinker Slovoj Zizek will also say that it is inscribed in the things themselves.
In a different way, Husserl, from whom all the affiliation of modern phenomenology is heir, also proposed, to return to consciousness of the things themselves.
Modern cynicism has also become a form of ideology in which a mask continues to turn into action, building grand theories that both “figuratively” and “in the literal sense act as if they don’t know or don’t know reality, everything is narrative only to use the current word.
Hence the critique of cynical reason defending a critical-ideological-classical procedure that has become obsolete, and this critique now contrasts a lightness of humor with the excess of theory.
The author will say: “[…] The great thought of antiquity has its roots in the experience of enthusiastic serenity, when, at the height of having thought, the thinker sets aside, letting himself be penetrated by the ‘revelation’ of the truth” , is very close to the distance proposed by some “active” authors, but with the differences of “enthusiastic” serenity and the view of “Being”.
This view of the cosmos in antiquity, says the author: “it is based for the Ancients on “cosmic passivity” and on the observation that radical thinking can recover its inevitable backwardness in relation to the given world, in by virtue of its experience of being, it reaches the same level as the “whole.”
SLOTERIJK, P. (2012) Critica da Razão Cínica (Critique of Cynic Reason), trans. Marco Casanova. BR, São Paulo: Estação Liberdade.
The whole and the part
The part and whole is separated in ocidental culture.
“The world becomes more and more a whole. Each part of the world is, more and more, part of the world and the world, as a whole, is increasingly present in each of its parts. This is true not only for nations and peoples, but for individuals. Just as each point of the hologram contains the information of the whole of which it is a part, also, henceforth, each individual receives or consumes information and substances from the entire universe” (MORIN, 2006, p. 67).
This is to understand what in the complex thought of Edgar Morin calls the hologrammatic principle, this was also the starting point of the thought of Werner Heisenberg to start the quantum thinking and that has a book with this name backwards, “The part and the whole”.
Also Gregório de Matos Guerra (1639-1696), one of the representatives of the Brazilian Baroque, wrote a poem called “Eucharist”, in which he says: “God is all in every sacrament”, and how important it would be for those who believe to understand this, to understand what live the word.
Modern atomic physics has shed new light on problems ranging from ethical and political to philosophical and religious, in Heisenberg’s book in the preface which is almost a biography written in a sui generis way, he talks about dialogues with Einstein, Plank, Bohr, Dirac, Fermi , Pauli, Sommerfeld, Rutherford and several other colleagues.
The part and the whole are subtitled: “meetings and conversations about physics, philosophy, religion and politics”, which also makes him the initiator of a “complex and hologrammatic thought” as proposed many years later by Edgar Morin.
Understanding the complex civilizing situation we live in is not possible without this understanding.
MORIN, Edgar (2006)r. Introdução ao pensamento complexo. Brazil, Porto Alegre: Sulina.
It is only Trinitarian if there are three people
In the 3rd century Christians began to use the word prosopon which means the one in three persons, the first Christian council of Nicaea (325) was the divinity of Jesus discussed, because it was even easier, due to the dualism Being and non-Being, believe two than three.
To subsist the dualistic idea, some pseudo-theologians resorted to the idea that God the Father is the source and origin of all divinity, so the other two people were generated by the Father, creating a new way to deny the Trinitarian pericoresis, or if you prefer “ the dance ”in the internal divine relationship.
It was the Cappadocian priests, Gregório Magno, Gregório de Nissa and Basilio de Nissa who saw this contradiction, which comes in a new guise, from the exchange of the word prosopon (persona) for hypostasis and this in turn confused with boldness.
Basilio used the formula of Mt 28,19 which affirms that the communication of the Three in baptism manifests the Holy Spirit in the union of the Father with the son, in the same dignity, and manifests to man in baptism, that is why valid baptism is in the name of Three people.
Basilio classified the expression of faith, on the Trinitarian mystery, transforming and codifying the confused idea in the following formula: “Mia Ousía” and treis hypóstasis ”, presenting a distinction between ousia and hypostasis in the Trinity.
Hearing indicates what is common and unique to the three people, nature and substance. Hypostasis constitutes the particularity that each person of the Trinity constitutes, with no prevalence among them.
Gregório de Nazianzo was the first to apply the term perichoresis in the relationship between the two natures of Christ (Perichoresis cristológica).
Gregório of Nissa states that in the Holy Trinity there is no difference in honor and that the structure that differentiates the servant cannot apply to divine persons, since the divine nature is unknowable and eternal.
Its was John Damasceno in the seventh century (+749) who did further and a synthesis of the doctrine of Cappadocian priests, a new opening developing perichoresis, using it as a technical term designating, both the interpenetration of the two natures in Christ and the interpenetration of each other of the Three Divine People, will define what is co-substantiality.
The key to reading understanding the Trinitarian, who passes by God-son (Jesus) who abandons himself in the hands of the Father, to the point of calling him as any man would call him God and no longer a Father, is a crucial point for a theology contemporary, where the division, the pain, the injustice, the evil that man causes himself and humanity, lives, there is a face of this “Abandoned Jesus” (the figure above was found by chance on a table).
Together with Him we find dialogue, we overcome radicalisms, misunderstandings and errors.