Arquivo para a ‘Noosfera’ Categoria
The idealistic religion
24
Jul
Among the Young Hegelians, those who along
with Marx criticized the “old Hegelians”, especially David Strauss and Bruno Bauer, was Ludwig Andres Feuerbach (1804-1821) much better known for Karl Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” than for his own work, but his concepts, although criticized by Marx, also influenced him in addition to the other “new Hegelians” also known as the “Hegelian left”.
Feuerbach, coming from a Catholic environment, was educated in Protestantism, from a young age he was oriented towards religion, beginning his studies at the University of Heidelberg, but upon meeting Friedrich Hegel, he abandoned theology and became a student of this philosopher for two years, which provoked profound changes in his thinking and creates what I call here “idealistic religion”, but the God of Christianity is no longer Feuerbach’s god.
Hegel’s idea of the absolute is well known, where his “in itself” which is his “one” is not alienated from matter to finally emerge as “Absolute Spirit”, but man, as a conscious species, is the infinite itself and absolute, being man’s reason for his “liberation” to the detriment of indoctrination or Christianization (Feuerbach, 2013, p. 2-23) this God that man “imagines” is for the young Hegelian now in fact his own being, its own essence, it is necessary to understand that Being for idealists is not ontological Being, but rather an “anthropological” being.
Thus, religiosity, in the idealist analysis, would not be linked to an immaterial being, which transcends the human (idealist transcendence is the knowledge of the object), it is not a timeless and creative Being, but nature itself, in another way Spinoza also explored this .
Thus Feuerbach understands that man’s relationship with his “god”, which is different from other “young Hegelians” (Marx will criticize him), his god or gods, is founded on his own ex-sistence, a subject also explored in ontology, but seen as a relationship with “time” or temporal being.
The idealistic god is the one that man externalizes “is nothing more than the divinized essence” (Feuerbach, 2009, p. 29), in a way even more so as “the history of religion is the history of man” (Feuerbach, 2009 , p. 30) and here lies the dividing line with Marx because he sees history as his “mode of production”, the relationship with work and the means of production to carry it out: feudalism, capitalism, etc. Thus Feuerbach understands that man’s relationship with the supersensible, which for him “exists”, that is, has its ex-sistence, is in fact an “aesthetic pathology”, an amalgamation of mystical feelings that are at the same time the foundation and promoter of religiosity. : “Mourning and pain at the death of a person or at the diminution of light and heat, joy at the birth of a person, at the return of light and heat after freezing winter days or at the harvest, terror at phenomena in themselves terrible or at the least in man’s imagination… (Feuerbach, 2009, p. 49). So the big mistake, even for “religious people”, is to separate substantiality from spirituality, which is, in our view, the essence of false contemporary asceticism.
Feuerbach, Ludwig. (2009) Preleções sobre a Essência da Religião. Trad. José da Silva Brandão. Petrópolis/RJ. Editora Vozes.
Feuerbach, Ludwig. (2013) A Essência do Cristianismo. Trad. José da Silva Brandão. Petrópolis/RJ. Editora Vozes.
Fatigue and true rest
18
Jul
Giving a psychological and sociological picture
of contemporary society Byung-Chul Han describes her as having “Neural diseases such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), borderline personality disorder (BPD) or Burnout Syndrome (SB) determine the pathological landscape of the beginning of the 21st century (HAN, 2017, p. 7).
Using a concept from his PhD advisor (he did his thesis on Heidegger) Peter Sloterdijk, his analysis extends to what he calls “the object of immunological defense is strangeness as such” (p. 8), the book was written before the pandemic ( also wrote about it in the Palliative Society, the one that rejects pain) and the concept of immunology here is one that states that the last century was a time in which a “clear division was established between inside and outside… the Cold War I followed the immunological regimen.”
Thus the book will explore the mystical concepts of Saint Gregory of Nazianzen, master of the contemplative life (of which Han also wrote a book), explores fundamental aspects of the inner life that combats the serious problems of the Active Life, which pushes us towards efficiency and tiredness under the pressure of demands and the cultural war that has taken place.
The immunological paradigm says “it is not in line with the process of globalization… also hybridization, which dominates not only the theoretical-cultural discourse, but also the feeling we have in today’s life, is diametrically contrary precisely to immunization” (p. 11).
His concept of resistance goes in the direction of Edgar Morin’s “resistance of the spirit”, but in our view it reaches the heart of the matter: “the dialectic of negativity is the fundamental feature of immunity” (p. 11), where the discourse of “engagement” is actually the void, as it is absent of true alternatives, as current immunology is one that accuses the Other, we remember here the distance from the pandemic (after the book as we said), a good “metaphor”.
Baudrillard quotes, speaking of the “obesity of all current systems”, in a time of overabundance, “the problem turns more to the rejection and expulsion” (pg. 15) of the Other.
His accurate elaboration on page 27 is that current “disciplinary systems” (or pseudo-ethical) seek the logic of production “what causes depression and exhaustion is not just the imperative to obey only oneself, but the pressure of performance” (p. 27).
Thus, meditating and completing is not distancing oneself from reality, but the possibility of looking at it with different eyes, seeking a true human and spiritual asceticism, where we can truly find rest and peace (despite and against daily wars and wars) because in truth is only possible through it.
I remember the biblical passage that says “come to me, all you who are tired” (Mt 11,28) and in a reinterpretation for today, in addition to seeking the divine, it is also about finding true interiority, which should not be disconnected from the vita activa, under penalty of tiredness.
Han, Byung-Chul. (2017) A Sociedade do Cansaço (Burnout Society), trans. Enio Paulo Giachini, 2nd. ed. Ampliada, Brazil, RJ: Petrópolis, Vozes.
Wisdom and simplicity
17
Jul
Among the various contemporary narratives,
one of the most absurd is the praise of ignorance as if it were an ally of simplicity and humility, from the “cultural” to the religious world this is transformed into narratives: he did not attend college, he did not read a book, did not walk among wise men, etc. Do not confuse this with the ability to live simply and among simple people.
It’s not a sign of the times, it’s not “generational”, it’s just a lack of interest in true asceticism, in an inner and outer growth that gives your human nature that something more that is the only thing capable of removing depression, anguish, anxieties and other illnesses. current.
The wise man is an observer, and observes not only the everyday scenes, those that different types of people live in, especially the simplest ones, but also the one who searches in the history of humanity for those peaks of civilizational moments that made us more people, more human. and more supportively, there are many examples, authors and people who gave us this.
We posted yesterday about fresh water and hot food, but in several regions this has interesting contours and cultural aspects, for example, in many countries there is no breakfast, an African told me, in Portugal there is breakfast which is a breakfast. simple morning, and in Brazil what is called breakfast is actually a small lunch.
What to read beyond is of course your personal belief, read the Bible, the Quran, the Vedas or what is sacred or culturally read in a certain culture, the red book in China for example, the second most read book in Brazil is The little prince, although Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist is 5th. in the world, but Iliad and Odyssey are still little read, King Lear and Othello by William Shakespeare are increasingly less known.
Of course, wisdom does not mean literary culture, but far from it it also becomes narrative in the sense that it ignores cultural history, the modern model of the novel is present throughout Western culture, and Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert are representatives for different tastes, but even for social criticism they should be read.
Someone can launch the philosophical argument, it is an entire Eurocentric culture, true, but it has been incorporated into everyday thoughts, nationalism through national colors is all over the world, freedom of expression, as the romantic Victor Hugo (Les Misarables (photo), in my opinion, the best of romantics said: “Not even a rule, nor models” is also an expression of individualism and personal heroism, but historical.
We made several posts about being, interiority and the complement of Contemplative Life with Active Life (Hannah Arendt and Byung-Chul Han in particular), about the methodology of the hermeneutic circle where we must listen to the text (and also the dialogues) for fusion of horizons and also the disaster of our Western culture and the need for resistance of the spirit.
The question of spirit in Hegel
10
Jul
Byung-Chul Han criticizes Hegel’s Phenomenology
of Spirit seen “in terms of the forgetfulness of being” (Heidegger’s central theme) as an “arid self” that finds “its limitation to the being that encounters it” (Han, 2023, p. 334), this is not the resistance of the spirit.
Hegel recovers in part, in the epigraph of the last chapter “truth is the whole”, re-discusses the dialectic and its metaphysics in idealism “in relation to “just being” which empties it to a name “that no longer names anything”, consciousness natural… when he realizes being, he assures that it is something abstract” (Han, 2023, p. 336).
This natural (idealistic) consciousness “lingers on “perversities” … “it tries to eliminate one perversity by organizing another, without remembering that the authentic inversion” [occurs when] “the truth of the essence is withdrawn into the being” (Han, 2023, p. 336, citing Heidegger).
In contrast to Hegel’s dialectic, this topic would fill a book, it engages in a dialogue with Derrida and Adorno on the question of mourning and the work of mourning, killing death is not just something secret in the heart of Plato or Hegel (pg. 384), but also reverse the negative of Being.
This work of “tragedy” is distinguished from the “work of mourning” of dialectics (Han, 2023, p. 385), it is what Han calls in other works excessive positivity, not understanding pain (in the palliative society, for example, analyzing the pandemic and the pain itself).
“Tears free the subject from his narcissistic interiority… they are the “spell that the subject casts on nature” (Han, 2023, p. 394), citing Adorno the “Aesthetic Theory” is the book of tears and that contrary to Kant, “the spirit perceives, in relation to nature, less its own superiority than its own naturalness” (Han, 2023, p. 395).
Hegel’s absolute is abstract: “the Absolute is absolute only to the extent that it knows itself as Absolute, that is, as self-consciousness” (Hegel in §565 of the Phenomenology of Spirit).
For true asceticism it is beyond human nature, it leads to an ascension, a new interiority that expresses itself in a more human exteriority, not human self-consciousness (even thought of in religion) but rather that which admits human singularity in the one divine and This is Absolute.
Han, B-C. (2023) O coração de Heidegger: o conceito de tonalidade afetiva em Martin Heidegger (Heidegger’s Heart: on the concept of affective tonality in Martin Heidegger). Trans. Rafael Rodrigues Garcia, Milton Camargo Mota. Brazil, RJ: Petrópolis, Vozes.
Interiority in a time of exteriorities
04
Jul
Modern man has not only projected himself
onto objects (what idealist philosophy calls subjectivity) but there is also an absence of inner asceticism, what projects and builds itself in his soul, are not just values, but a characteristic of being- there (dasein).
This extends more deeply into the disbelief that there is any interiority and then cultivating empathy, altruism, goodwill and sharing the common good is increasingly distant in the face of selfish, narcissistic values and the cultivation of only worldly exteriority.
The Neoplatonists, like Plotinus (205 – 270), believed in monism and in this radiation of light, there is a one or a god (it was not the Christian God) from which emanates a divine source that radiates throughout all creation, in this one light that Augustine of Hippo will rely on this philosophy to deny the Manichaean dualism which he had previously believed and from there he turned to Christianity.
Soul, or anima for the Greeks, is not just an interiority but also what moves it externally, so it is not disconnected from its actions in the world, the distance between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, was described by many authors, in antiquity Gregory of Nazianzen (329-369), a Christian mystic who is cited by Byung-Chul Han in the Society of Fatigue, and developed more fully in his more recent book Vitta Comtemplativa.
The Jewish festival of the Sabbath (or Shabbat) (photo) is described in Byung-Chul Han’s book as the phatos of the action, which he begins in his book by describing this festival that contemplates God and the Sabbath, for Jewish culture redemption, the immortal (page 107), yesterday time is suspended, that is, the moment of pause in human action for divine action, thus complementing the action.
Exteriority and interiority are related, civilization’s malaise is due to the culture and time we live in, but also interiorities without true asceticism.
In the Bible, when a paralytic (someone with difficulty in acting) approaches Jesus before healing him, he states that his sins are forgiven (Mt 9:5), he gives him full interiority, the Sabbath.
Han, Byung-Chul. (2023) Vita Contemplativa (Contemplative Life). Trans. Lucas Machado, Brazil, RJ: Petropolis.
Courage and Being
02
Jul
The imprudent is not courageous, in ancient times
Plato and Aristotle defined it in a similar way, for Plato courage “knows what not to fear” while for Aristotle it is the moral virtue that lies in the middle ground between cowardice and recklessness.
However, when courage becomes cowardice, it is certainly not when one is prudent and knows the dangers that surround a certain attitude, but if it is a virtue it cannot be far from the truth, so it means that it cannot renounce the truth, under penalty of renouncing the your Being.
But truth is not a vision of data, facts or a position in the face of reality, philosophy and modern physics include a third hypothesis between Being and non-Being, and thus the Aristotelian “middle term” is possible without it being the capitulation of truth.
The theme of anguish and fear, which occurs when there is a threat to one’s existence, often leading people to remain in the dispersion of concern, in Heidegger, this dispersion, which is the way of existing for most people, can only be overcome through an “anticipatory decision” that leads Dasein to accept within it only what is finite, moral or immediate.
Other authors, such as Kierkegaard, who criticized those who had thought of a solution to this concern in a God “imagined” by reason, and in this sense he is correct since it is not deposited in faith, criticize those who had thought of a transcendence of the “God above of God”, which would be a kind of courage of the Being, and this would be the power of being with roots in transcendence, they are right because, not being something divine, “trust in God” transforms into a power located beyond, and thus becomes the confidence in yourself.
There is something in human existence that is a kind of ultimate fear: death, there are those who seek the source of eternal youth, the prolongation of life, but human finitude is something that causes a fatal fear, and in the face of death, very few are those that do not invoke the divine presence, the presence of the mother or some other divine resource.
The Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han clarifies this well: “The modern loss of faith, which concerns not only God and the hereafter, but reality itself, makes human life radically transitory” because living well in each present moment is be in eternity.
Not everyone believes because they need to see the eternal, but Thomas, who lived with Jesus, needed to touch him when he was resurrected to believe that there is the eternal, there is the infinite beyond the human, the Being-there that we are.
The Just, wrath and serenity
21
Jun
Martino Bracarense, an author from the 5th 
century AD who is little known but is one of those responsible for the days of the week in the Galician-Portuguese language Monday, Tuesday, etc., stated that “Anger transforms all things that are best and fairest into their opposite”, There are many philosophical, psychological and even poetic reflections on anger, William Shakespeare stated that: “Anger is a poison that we take waiting for the other to die” (the photo on the side is by Andre Hunder on unsplash).
In stormy times, to maintain justice and serenity, a great effort of character and temperance is necessary because the normal thing is to react to the pain of hatred with some form, even if disguised as hatred, Aristotle stated: “a desire, accompanied by pain, to perceived revenge, due to a perceived disregard towards an individual or his neighbor, coming from people from whom disregard is not expected” (Aristotle’s Rhetoric).
What does accompanied (anger) by pain mean? This requires Aristotle’s definition of pathê: “emotions are all those things because of which people change their thoughts and disagree with their judgments, being accompanied by pain and pleasure, for example anger, pity, fear and all other things similar to their opposites”, is clearly not an exhaustive definition of anger, as it would require psychological and pathological elements and a more in-depth analysis of the topic.
The important thing is to know that it: escapes justice, produces intemperance and is placed in a sequence of structural hatreds, it ends up creating a total absence of serenity, of capacity for reflection and, in the end, it produces a great source of injustice and even even psychopathologies.
Another point is to think about the antidote to this state of mind, often cultural, structural and produced by those who believe they defend peace, of course in essence these same individuals are themselves pathological cases, because disguised anger, or as the popular saying goes “distilled poison”, unlike medicine, is not antithetical, it is poison in continuous and progressive doses.
Where then to find serenity? The answer is simple in hope, the very hope that waits, that breathes and that meditates and contemplates, a theme exhaustively elaborated in Byung-Chul Han in almost all of his themes, In the swarm where he exhorts “respect” as the only form of symmetry, silence and contemplation in “Vita Contemplativa” and the concept of affective tone in his work “Heidegger’s heart: about the concept of affective tone”, although he never sites the term directly, I think that is what he ultimately intends to contribute to contemporary thought to recover its ability to think, contemplate and Be.
The religious thought of our time also needs to recover more than serenity, sobriety, because they seem to be enveloped by certain intoxications of our time, as stated by Judeo-Christian thought, the wind came and God was not there: “after the earthquake there was a fire , but the Lord was not in it. And after the fire there was the murmur of a gentle breeze” (1 Kings 12) and the storm of Jesus among the sleeping apostles and a storm happening is also famous, He wakes up and tells the sea to calm down to the astonishment of the apostles (Mk 4,39).
The Just and reconciliation
20
Jun
Justice practiced only in a legalistic way and
without any mercy is only human and does not presuppose social peace, it incites hatred between adversaries.
The social contract established in modernity, actually comes from the idea of Absolute by the first contractualist John Hobbes (1588-1679) and also from the idea of Machiavelli’s The Prince, in fact transfers all rights and justice to the State and this does not mean that he does not practice injustice, in modernity we know that he does.
Also at the height of idealism, Hegel (1770-1831) developed a teleological idea of the Absolute, which is an abstract figure even though he characterizes it as a “substantial power”, which at the moment of its subjectivity and singularity of this concept manifests itself as a universal substance, which through its abstraction If it is effective as a kind of singular self-awareness, replacing the idea of essence of Ontology, it is something abstract indeed.
The idea of justice translated in the Just by Paul Ricoeur, Habermas and other authors is the idea that it is not the singularity of a substance, but must be embodied in something concrete which is the Just, this potentially can and should develop within what is moral and ethical, in classical antiquity the philosophers, in particular Plato who sought education for citizens, he should have the virtues, aretê, which in its most precise meaning means excellence, and Aristotle develops it as phronesis, which is the politician.
It seems like a lot of abstract theory, in our view Hegelian idealism really is, but the virtues and political excellence of each person is not abstract, it means the ability of each person to exercise politics considering the rights of the other and the ethical responsibility towards social goods, in particular, the common good.
Reconciliation is always that conflict situation where it is possible to review each person’s social responsibilities and the different ethics of social positioning, if someone commits a serious or minor offense, it is always possible to find the Just, that point at which the parties involved can establish a type of private social contract, minimizing damage or loss to the parties involved.
The biblical reading says if you do not reconcile with your brother, he will take you to the judge, the judge to the court and from there you will go to prison, so it is better to reconcile first.
What is the universe made of and what is its origin?
30
May
Greek philosophers from the 6th century BC
believed that the four elements of all nature were: fire, earth, water and air, Pythagoras proposed a practically religious school that everything was numbers while Democritus proposed the atom and that they would have rounded, smooth, irregular shapes and smooth, being able to form an infinity of elements, but until the end of the Middle Ages it was believed that fire was composed of one of these particles: the firegist, we owe the chemical table to Dimitri Mendelev who in 1869 organized his chemical elements, previously the alchemist Henning Brad discovered that phosphorus heated with urine residue caused flames and Antoine Lavoisier in 1789 organized some elements into simple, metallic, non-metallic and non-metallic.
Current standard physics has established 7 elements: neutrinos, electron, quarks, photon, graviton, gluon and weak force boson, but there is a more mysterious quantum world that of superstrings, it seems frightening or using the physicists’ word ghostly (Einstein used it the first time realizing that there is a third state in quantum physics in which the element is neither nor is it, later called the Included Third).
The most convincing theory of the universe until recently was that of the Big Bang and an expanding universe, entropy, Stephen Hawking was its great theorist, although this theory already existed before, and thus proposed an “arrow of time” in his most important book. famous “A brief history of time” (1988), but James Webb’s discoveries called into question when he found galaxies and celestial bodies at the edge of the universe that shouldn’t be there, now even the arrow of time is questioned.
The important thing when looking at the universe is to understand where everything came from and whether this whole thing and intelligent life, which for now we only find on our planet Earth, had a beginning and more importantly, had an intention.
The biblical “fiat lux” seems to agree so much with the Big Bang theory, before atoms there were waves or “strings” created in the first 10−44 seconds (Planck time) and then subatomic elements were created, in the case of strings, everything It is initially formed by one-dimensional strings that would be divided into “open” strings (linear) and “closed” strings (in loop strength), vibrating at different frequencies that would give rise not only to the 7 elements, but also the molecules that initiate life.
Be that as it may, there was an initial moment, and the form of this “being” must have been preceded by a creative “being”, the paleontologist and Christian theologian Teilhard Chardin proposed that the entire universe would be the body of this supreme “Being” of the “being”, thus he should have a divine and a material (human) reality, thus he proposed that the universe is Christocentric.
It is not possible for the All to have emerged from nothing, and if there is an original form of the All, of some “element” the physical world is composed, thus there is a “Corpus” of this All, with the difference that He is the creator and all the rest created, but created with some substrate of its own Supreme Being, of course the theory for this is more elaborate, but its understanding is simple, we are part of a body, of a group that communicates, the idea of the individuation of the universe is not plausible, because at the beginning we were one thing: a small cosmic corpuscle, a set of vibrating strings (we could even think of a choir making a song), but there was a moment of creation. and Someone created it.
Renunciation, economy and joy
28
May
Byung-Chul theorizes that despite the difference
between Derridá and Heidegger (see our previous post) there is a structural affinity in their vision of mourning, which is characterized by the renunciation of the subject’s autonomy in Derrida: “No matter how narcissistic our subjective speculation continues to be, , it can no longer close itself to this gaze, before which we ourselves show ourselves the moment we convert it into our mourning or we can give up on it [faire de lui notre dueil], mourning, making ourselves mourn for ourselves, I mean, I mourn the loss of our autonomy, for everything that made us the measure of ourselves” (Han, p. 430 citing Derridá’s text “Krafter der Trauer”, strengthening of pain), this That is, they both have in common a vision of renouncing the autonomy of the subject, the “I” of idealism.
Here the important thing is not to let mourning work (let us remember the concept already seen in the posts about “work mourning”) it is replaced in Derridá by a game of mourning: “however, the happier the joy, the purer the sadness that sleeps in it. The deeper the sadness, the more it calls us to joy…” (Han, pg. 430-431), but Heidegger’s mourning, explains Han, does not kill death, trying to kill it results in something even worse: “ wanting to resurrect, violently and actively surpassing the limit of death would only drag them (the gods) into a false and non-divine proximity and would bring death instead of our life” (Han, pg. 431-432 quoting Heidegger).
Heidegger explains that it is “not a symptom that can be eliminated by psychoeconomic accounting. He does not have a deficient trait that involves work (of mourning).
This “withdrawn” or “saved” for which Heidegger’s “holy and mourning” heart beats is not subject to economics, this “saved” cannot be spent or capitalized, it is therefore that which is and characterizes renunciation, Han does not exemplifies, but we can think of humanitarian aid in disasters and wars, as it will characterize the identity of renunciation and gratitude as conceivable outside of economics, using Heideggerian terms “grievously bear the need to renounce” and promises the “unthinkable donation”.
A profound and wise phrase by Heidegger says, renunciation is the “highest form of possession”, it seems contrary, but we only really have what we can give because otherwise it is a commodity of exchange, and even more so renunciation becomes gratitude and “ duty of gratitude”, this pain increases and becomes joy: “the deeper the sadness, the more the joy that rests in it calls us”. (pg. 433), but it does not even become sublimation, which forces us to “work”, as it is the “inhibition of all income” and the “awareness of the emptiness and poverty of the world”.
Praise of misery one might think, is not a praise of moderate and continuous joy, different from the euphoria and ecstasy that is followed by depression, “the lack of the divine brings about mourning, goes back to an obstinate forgetfulness of being, in which Heidegger inscribes the divine” (Han, p. 433-434), but it is certainly not yet the biblical divine, but surrounds it.
The reward and joy of the Divine inscribed in the being, is that which renounces and gives, but knows that there will be a reward of receiving a hundred times more, not in goods, but in joy.
Han, Byung-Chul (2023) Coração de Heidegger: sobre o conceito de tonalidade afetiva em Martin Heidegger (Heidegger’s heart: on the concept of affective tonality in Martin Heidegger). Transl. Rafael Rodrigues Garcia, Milton Camargo Mota. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes.
