Arquivo para a ‘Noosfera’ Categoria
Human-only eschatology
08
Dec
Two misconceptions about Christmas are that it is only the birth
of Jesus, at least the historical Jesus must be admitted as a man who exists because there was a census when he was born, the second is what came and what will come, the advent is like that that (or that) that comes and will come.
Rereading the work Homo sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari presents a Darwinian evolutionary perspective showing how man imposed his life on the planet, contemplating three phases: the collector, the agricultural (and sedentary), the industrial and the modern phase of information intensive, and search align the structural elements that connect with the cultural order and its foundations.
In terms of its culture, the general beliefs shared in each phase, which he calls fictional myths, to which he attributes the indispensable social cohesion and the undertakings of each period.
Even though he is a Jew, who has a strong abramic eschatology, he refuses the existence of the soul, conscience and individuality, considering that science has not detected this, and that the remarkable achievements of contemporary science dispense with these existences.
His long and elaborate work which, in denying these metaphysical existential facts, takes the same path as the neologicists, of algorithms that would regulate even biological life, but consciousness is something so disconnected from intelligence and is that organisms are just algorithms.
The classic sense of the cosmos, explored since Plato, the energy required to trigger an algorithm of creation, the energy without which the very idea of an algorithm cannot be sustained, is something that already pre-existed before the hominization of the cosmos (nature became himself) and what will be the future of this process about which Harari himself asks, without soul and awareness of this end.
These questions point to an eschatology, beginning and end, and we do not have a bet on a distant or near end if we do not have answers on a principle, the eschatological logic of Being.
Although Harari’s eschatology is not complete, there is no transcendence, he realizes that we are close to a very dangerous civilizing threshold, both in the human aspect and in the balance of nature, and that man will be able to accomplish this task alone without something superior.
Deserts and the oracles
04
Dec
We walk like somnambulists in the dark, points out Edgar Morin, this
is not a favorable time for thinking, says Peter Sloterdijk, Byung Chul Han says that our time is the “desert or hell of the same”, but I would say that the desert can still be fertile, and having an Oasis, however sterile, is mass, depersonalizing and more than authoritarian, it identifies us to nothing.
These are some of the voices that I identify as a desperate search for a return not to the old normal, but to a really new normal, it must not be this at the end of the pandemic, but the hell that leveled us all below, for the inhuman, the irrational and cynicism.
Edgar Morin points to education as a path to this renewal, but who will be teachers with new thinking and new mentality, Byung Chul Han points to the care of the land, his new book “Praise of the Earth” that points to a community garden, where the rhythms and characteristics of each flower are registered and received with their oriental attention, centered on the simple elements of each flower.
Peter Sloterdijk had already written if Europe Awakened, we could say now if the world woke up in the post-pandemic, if we really looked at the Moral Good that Morin proposes, for a concrete and truly universal fraternity offered by Father Francisco in his encyclical Fratelli Tutti but I think they are voices that cry out in the desert like John the Baptist who died beheaded by the request of a sensual dancer who had enchanted Herod.
When the Pharisees went to John the Baptist, who lived in the wilderness, wearing camel skins and eating bee honey and cereals, he replied (John 1:23): “I am the voice of the one who cries out in the wilderness, ‘Make a straight path to the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said.”
When there are oracles, thinkers, and scholars who speak in the wilderness a change is near.
The desert and the future
03
Dec
It is not just the pandemic, in fact it can pass, but its problems have
not only passed but are getting worse, the future ahead may be a serious crisis, not only due to economic and social difficulties, at the root there is a crisis of the thought.
The number of emotional and psychological problems of a long period of isolation is already visible, and the following cycles of euphoria and exaggeration may be worse, part of the second wave in Brazil reveal the data are parties and inexplicable agglomerations in the middle of a pandemic .
Augusto Cury’s novel talking about the Future of Humanity, seems to point only to the focus of people with psychic problems can be solved and that the relationship with these patients who are marginalized and treated as without identity, indignant a young student named Marco Polo, the adventurous Venetian navigator of the 13th century, whose name his father gave in his honor.
The challenge for this young man is that in addition to medication, treatment with dialogue and psychology can lead to a real revolution in the treatment of people like that.
The world has already changed, the new normality can present serious problems of both social and psychological origin, but the awareness that all this can and should be treated with dialogue and without escape mechanisms, such as drinks, drugs and parties, can help a another cure besides the pandemic, of course this is not the subject of the book.
The book The travels of Marco Polo certainly inspired the navigations and explorations of the East in the passage from the Renaissance to Modernity, written between 1271 and 1295, tells the experiences of this young man in the court of Kublai Khan, however the journey is made of struggles and challenges (see illustration of the original work above) and the voyages of great navigators came in the following years, there is a crossing to be made today.
I also remember the phrase by Augusto Cury in which he says that only those who can cross the desert are worthy of the oasis.
Eschatology and Christmas
27
Nov
As an ontological synthesis of the eschatology that we developed this
week, we return to Heidegger in his three eschatological concepts.
Be careful, Heidegger appropriates the Greek fable in which Jupiter and Care that is shaping clay fight over the name that will be given to the created figure, and called Saturn as a judge he says that Jupiter will belong to the spirit because he was the one who gave it the form , while Care will have the land, since it formed it, and Care will belong to the shape of the clay he created, so to care in the present moment.
Impersonality is one in which it breaks the relationship with the world, and makes the individual isolated, “out of relations of familiarity with the world” and thus almost always in the absence of the other. it breaks this relationship, and makes the isolated individual “fall out of familiarity with the world,” says Heidegger.
Silence is the final aspect of this eschatology, it is invoked when the individual has already discovered himself, and returns to the world now master of himself, so is the return of peace and the harmonious relationship with the world, even if he is in conflict, or in one of his deaths.
Christmas is not only celebrated by many Christians of different sects, although curiously it awaits the new coming, which is the parousia and it is also celebrated in the first weeks of Christmas, the time of advent, but this is the separation we speak of Being of life and being-for-death.
They are not disconnected, it is in it that death, the resurrection of life and the new coming, or a new time, or what happens after a small or great tragedy develops, I think it is true that we live in a time like this, but eschatology who intends to deny death is death itself.
The urgent need for changes in the human life of the planet, in respect for the planet itself, for the Other that is not our mirror, is not “our class”, it is more and more a demand for change, for the death of an old system and to be reborn in a new civilizing perspective.
And if that time comes, that eschatological end, which is the biblical recommendation for those who believe, is the one that is in Mark (Mark 13: 33-34): “33“ Watch out! Pay attention, because you do not know when the time will come. 34It is like a man who, when he left abroad, left his home under the responsibility of his employees, distributing his task to each one. And he told the porter to keep watch “, whether or not this time comes “watch”.
While for the Christian it must mean an eternal parousia, that is, waiting for a new coming, for non-Christians it must be aware of a new time, a resumption of social, ecological and human values that are abandoned, in crisis or almost succumbed in a civilization in crisis.
A Christmas without big parties and consumerism should be a Christmas closer to its meaning, the Christmas of Care, Impersonality (respect for the Other) and Silence, is an almost perfect eschatology, as it would be if we could actually feel the return of a true time of salvation.
The eschatological infinity
26
Nov
Transcendence as an idea of the Infinite can be understood in
Lévinas’ philosophy as “The presence of a being that does not enter the sphere of the Same, a presence that exceeds it, fixes its’ status” of infinity, this is how the idea will appear in Lévinas of Foreigner and there he in his own eschatology.
The term Foreigner is typical of the biblical tradition from which Emmanuel Lévinas feeds, as many feed on Greek mythology, it is present in the fourfold prophet Isaiah, a prophet as in the mode of the celebrated Greek poets Homer and Hesiod, is curious because it can if Lévinas’s part sees a convergence between Hellenic and Semitic culture, contrary to all fury against Judeo-Christian culture.
The quadratics are as follows: the poor (who have no economic resources), the widow (who has no husband to support her), the orphan (who has no shelter to collect him), the foreigner (who has no country to step on) . they are the synthesis of what we now call and excluded in biblical times, and we can see in a new “philosophical” eschatology by Lévinas the idea of an eschatological “end” not as the end of time, but the end of poverty, of female helplessness (today more serious is femicide), the organs of wars and foreigners who walk around the world and which Bauman comes to irony (amazement) and then a new apocalypse.
It is thus that the infinite and the being-for-death can also have an eschatological interpretation, without any prejudice or presumption to the religious sense that may at some point occur, and from which the planet is not exempt, after all an eschatological end present in many non-Christian religions is what the earth itself (the mother-earth) rebels against, again a convergence with biblical prophecies.
The big reason why this idea was almost abolished in modernity, Leibniz already claimed it, is said by Lévinas: “My life and history do not form totality. The common that allows us to speak of objectified society, and by which man resembles the thing and individualizes himself as a thing, is not first ”(in Ethics and Infinite), and Lévinas will define this process as“ infinity ”(perhaps a better translation would be infinitation, but they did not translate this way), an inversion of modern subjectivity, because the subject is subjecting himself to Other, and thus lives his personal “in process” eschatology, subject to the Infinite.
On the social scale it is the foreigner, the poor and the one who suffers some kind of prejudice (the racist, for example, but there are others including the religious) and with this we are heading towards an authentic eschatological end, an apocalypse of the current world without brake and without a safe direction for all humanity.
Infinity as an eschatological complement
25
Nov
Every eschatology has a beginning and an end, it is a mistake to
imagine it only with what will happen at the end of time, the Christian apocalypse or al-dain of the Islamists, which is not in the Koran, but in the sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad,it must be thought of in the process.
In philosophy, the idea of the infinite permeates the eschatology that I call complete because it admits an end like that which Lévinas wrote in Totality and Infinite as the metaphysical desire to tend towards something totally different, the absolutely other, note that it is not God, because it is not theology, but the change that is possible to another metaphysical state, after all the subtitle of the book is “Essai sur l´extériorité”, and exteriority has something essential there.
For Lévinas the idea of the infinite is one that refers to the different and the distinct, says Enrique Dussel that Lévinas when saying different and distinct, affirms that the different occurs in the Totality and the distinct occurs in the Proximity, outside of this we remain in pure idealism of the transcendence of the Subject to the Object.
In the words of Lévinas: “Metaphysical desire tends towards something totally different, towards something else … On the basis of the commonly interpreted desire, there would be the need (bésoin): the desire would mark an indigent and incomplete or fallen being. its past greatness. It would coincide with the consciousness of what was lost”, Its eschatological end is this then, the fallen being of its past greatness and with awareness of what was lost.
This is also where his ethics lies, after all for Lévinas it is called metaphysics because it refers to the transcendence of others, which is not merely physical and the indicative of this transcendence is the idea of the infinite, that which occurs in the face to face, which is therefore the distinct found in Proximity.
It is this proximity to the “face to face” that is primordial in Lévinas, it is the original experience of the inter-human, here I relate it with the cultural origin where there is the identity of the inter-human, that is, of a human a posteriori in function from an a priori, it is in this sense that I consider original cultures.
The original experience is that of someone’s ethical closeness, of a relationship without a mask, and thus anthropology and ontology meet, in Lévinas’s words (I know that the point of view is different) “morality is not a branch of philosophy, but the first philosophy ”, that would be a balanced civilization.
The relation with the being-to-death that I see with this infinite, is that one does not think from the finite, just like death not through the negation of life, this was for Kant for whom the notion of infinity is opposed as an ideal of reason, Hegel modified but placed the positivity of the infinite, excluding diversity.
The infinite is diverse because it starts from the Other, from the other thing, and also the totally other, so its eschatology is complete, the being-for-death and the infinite merge (of course neither Heidegger nor Lévinas say it) because they are in the beyond self and in the beyond life containing it entirely.
Eschatology and being-to-death
24
Nov
Where we came from and where we are going, each culture has its
own eschatology, modernity and especially idealism is characterized by disregarding the idea of the infinite, of mystery and consequently of death, seen as fatality or simple finitude of life.
From the philosophy of Lévinas (Totality and Infinite) to the poetry of Goethe (Faust), from the novel by Tolstoy (The death of Ivan Ilitch) to the ontology of Heidegger (Being and Time) death is more than a concept or a theme, it is the own questioning of being, in Lévinas the infinite is proper to the transcendent being as transcendent, the infinite is the absolutely other, so one cannot think of the infinite, the transcendent, the Foreigner (in Lévinas) as being an object, but as an Other that does not it is something other than Being.
Idealism, in wanting to always live above the real, wants to ignore or “transcend” death (in the false sense of an object) and for this reason is quibble about it, but in the face of the tragedies of a pandemic, of a crisis that can become civilizing, he is immobilized or part of psychology, in this field there is also an adequate phenomenological treatment, after all Franz Brentano father of social psychology reopened phenomenology in modern times, the psychiatrist Kübler-Ross (About death and dying, Martins Fontes, 2002) studied that stage of the disease in which the patient asks “Why me” and deepened the theme.
The analysis in Heidegger, in order not to be superficial, must address three related themes: Care, Impersonality and silence, otherwise it is the analysis that we call epistemology or incomplete eschatology, since they face only pessimism in the face of death, nor the good psychology sees it that way.
Before a clarification, the term ontological refers to questioning the fact of existing, Dasein (being-there) is not only, but has a perception that it is, for phenomenology, it is not thought of itself first and then in the world, because the two things are inseparable, and so is an ontological epistemology.
To help what this being-there is, we need to deepen what Heidegger calls overcoming the factual world, and as for the super the world of impersonality, he manages to free himself from a structured reason endowed with meaning, in a way already given the to exist and to be.
Safranski, an authorized biographer of Heidegger, interprets it this way: “Anguish does not tolerate another god besides itself, and isolates in two ways. It breaks the relationship with the other, and makes the isolated individual fall out of relations of familiarity with the world ”, she is felt by the“ fall ”, by the dark horizon.
Thus, in impersonality, the idea of “everyone dies” is abandoned, which in life evades being-for-death, for its thinking about its solitary death, falls into that anguish described in Ivan Ilitch de Tolstoi.
Regarding Care, Heidegger appropriates the Greek fable in which Jupiter and Care that is shaping clay fight over the name that will be given to the created figure, and called Saturn as a judge he says that Jupiter will belong to the spirit because it was he who gave it the form, while Care will have the land, since it formed it, the German philosopher will use this sense, very ingenious, to say the being-for-death to find something beyond the finitude of the form.
Finally, the aspect of silence nad loneliness are invoked to discover the self, and then to return to the world already master of itself, and open to the relationship with others, which is no longer utilitarian ( so characteristic of idealists) or even by means of fixed guidelines (characteristic of incomplete eschatologies), there is thus a Being beyond the finite and open to the infinite, there is no pessimism, which says it is bad reading
An incomplete epistemology and eschatology
22
Nov
What phenomenology and ontological philosophy seeks is at the
center of the scientific crisis and of the thought that the West is experiencing, and whose epicenter is European, in Peter Sloterdijk’s enlightened saying that Europe is no longer the center as in the colonial period (empire of the Center) and looks for other forms of colonialism to take idealism forward, what in literature has been called epistemicide. In denying the cultures originating from other peoples, he thinks he is finding his own diffusion between barbarism and classical antiquity, he tries a new renaissance exploring the Greek culture in a diffuse way.
At the religious level the disaster is greater, Slavov Zizek recently wrote about the religious concept in Hegel, and the latter of the thinkers who tried to revive classical Marxism, reworked the Hegelian religion, but which was already present in Feuerbach and Marx himself criticized, in the bottom is an atheistic theology, a dead eschatology.
Dead because this is in fact the great mistake of idealistic eschatology, there is no transcendence for it without the separation of subject and object, it needs to deny the substantiality to affirm its “subjectivity” where the subject must always be dead, it denies being-for-dead Heidegger’s motto, but affirms death in life (it isnt epoché).
Every form of original culture, it is obvious that it includes those non-Christian cultures, has an origin (the name says it), the eschatological life and end, which is not where it is going, and at this point this incomplete theology diverges on the that in fact is death, in times of a pandemic one could say the disease that can kill.
For this reason, even if the appeal to phenomenology will be incomplete, it will lead those who incorporate it to exhaustion, to contempt for life, which even in the religious sense is something deeply sacred, its “biós”, its substantiality, to be clear to idealists, its objectivity, fall into theoretical abstractionism.
The only substantiality of this incomplete eschatology is to deny religion in order to make it idealistic and to ask for what is inhuman, what in biblical terms he calls “putting heavy burdens on the shoulders of others” and which they themselves refuse to carry in times of pandemic neither enter nor let others in.
The final exam will be substantial: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink…” and you will not be asked whether you have developed a good epistemology or theology, the one that made colonialism the terror of original cultures.
Our conscience will one day be charged
20
Nov
It is not necessary to be religious to realize that one day, even
in the face of death, we will think about what our life was like, how we treat the poor, all those close to us, nature and respect for the privacy of others, in short to everything that preserves life, and water is the origin of life, and there is no life if there is no Other who are not those who are so close, but also those who are distant or not from our circle.
Certainly we will have in mind someday about what we did and what we left as an inheritance for people who want us good or bad, it doesn’t matter, everyone will be facing their own conscience, and as phenomenology says conscience is awareness of something, what is this something in front of life. What are these essentials to life: hunger, thirst, homelessness and outrage to each person, it can be said that it is the invasion of privacy, the excess of public explosion, which Byung Chul Han calls narcissism, in addition to the various types of abuse, they are all a kind of nudity.
The lack of drinking water for around 500 million people, but also the lack of public policies on basic sanitation that affects another half billion people, makes the water problem a vital problem for many people on the planet.
Those who believe the final exam in which all will be charged before God are described by the evangelist Matthew as those who will be called to participate in the Kingdom of God (Mt 25: 35-39): “Because I was hungry, and you gave me to eat: because I was thirsty and you gave me to drink: I was a stranger, and you stayed with me: I was naked, and you dressed me, sick, and you visited me: in prison, and you went to see me. Then they will ask the righteous: Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you? Or thirsty and we gave you a drink? And when did we see you as a stranger and host you? Or naked and do we dress you? ”, and the answer will be everything we did to the little ones, you did to me.
The cruelty that remains even in pandemic times, when they do not even grow, makes the civilizing environment dangerous and worrying.
Healthy living and talents
13
Nov
A society of tiredness, fear and authoritarian pressure can stifle 
talents, hide natural gifts that all people have, and that developing them depends on special care such as giving time, space and having sensitivity for them to develop.
Another serious problem is the social demand for efficiency and the pressure for results, they will come naturally if there is room for learning, growth and respect for cultural and social differences, from cultivation in the family, through education and social structure, only gifts will be developed when these structures are prepared to support individual talent. From a personal point of view, it is often necessary to overcome feelings of inferiority, talk and seek support from specialists and social sectors who can develop the aptitude they have, who often need to deepen their vocations and cultivate the gifts they have until they express themselves as a talent.
All the sociological work of Marcel Mauss, in his Theory of the Gift, is to demonstrate that it is not always useful, the simple exchange for financial advantages that in many societies transform cultural and social gifts into healthy social structures where those talents that naturally develop each person has, the issue of exchange and reciprocity are studied in some ancient cultures.
By studying non-European cultures, the gift in the virtuous cycle of giving-receiving-returning, Mauss helped to deconstruct European universalism, and can be considered one of the sources of studies of decolonization.
In his essay, the anthropologist and sociologist Maus, very early realized this challenge of bringing together a discussion about the relationship between decolonial criticism and anti-utilitarian criticism as his vision of the “gift”. In studying non-Western cultures, Mauss seeks to demonstrate the healthy and “universal” value of the gift system, in the form of the give-take-return cycle, that existed before the emergence of the market and the State and continues to exist, despite the dominant utilitarian ideology that seeks to emphasize the selfishness and commercialism of the talents.
The biblical parable of the talents, where a man when traveling abroad delivers his goods to his employees, giving “talents”, although this means a financial value the analogy with the individual talents is clear in the text, says the reading Lk 25,14- 15: “A man was going to travel abroad. He called his employees and gave them their goods”.
One gave five talents, the other gave two talents and the third gave one; each according to their ability.
Then he traveled ”, and the parable states that the one who received five doubled his talent, while the one who received one buried it to return when the boss returned.
So it is not a question of egalitarianism, but of a free distribution of gifts and how each one works his talents, in a healthy context in the case of the parable the man “goes abroad”, that is, each one can work his talent as he received, and when he comes back he gives a greater reward to the one who worked the talents he received the most, but everyone receives some “value” in talents and has the opportunity to develop, it is also clear that in this context it is the ability of each one to receive and return talents, as Mauss completes the act of “giving”, creating a virtuous cycle.
