Arquivo para a ‘Noosfera’ Categoria
The Lady of God and Greek tragedy
14
Aug
The Greek tragedy Oedipus Rei was analyzed by the poet Hölderlin,
where he uses the term aorgic for the search that Oedipus does to know that it is, since it was donated to a pastor by father Laius to raise him, to avoid the tragedy predicted by the oracle Delphi, and to complete the tragedy Oedipus ends up marrying his own mother.
The term aorgic here is used to understand the corruption of human nature, and it can have a new meaning with each new human tragedy, it is Hölderlin’s sense when saying that “where there is fear there is salvation”, we must fear not only the pandemic that has already it is a disaster, but what can come from inhuman and agonizing after this tragedy.
There is no lack of apocalyptics, however the interesting thing would be to think beyond the tragedy and invert the role of Jocasta for a mother who defends and wants her children safe and sound, and so in a human reinvention we would look not at Eve of human creation, but at Mary who gave birth to the divine son.
It is not only religious prejudice that deviates from this deep sense of human fertility and motherhood, it is the relevance of the role of women in the background, Hölderlin’s analysis involves the paradoxes that commonly constitute the tragic, such as the human and the divine, and the poetic task of modernity as a possible task for any and all poetry, so its cultural plan cannot eliminate the tragic, but must also include the divine.
It is this misogyny of the human to the divine that denies any and all roles of women, Mary should be only a religious theme, but also the divine linked to the tragic, Pietá although remembered and revisited by so many authors, hides the role of the desolate mother before the a faint son, also Salvador Dali in his painting Christus Hypercubus places a female figure at the foot of the four-dimensional Christus, inspired by his wife.
Christians are ignored by the biblical passage of the evangelist Luke (Lk 1,43): “How can I deserve that the mother of my Lord comes to visit me”, and the Lord in this case is not only the divine-human son who will be born of Mary , but also the Lord God of Mary and Isabella, who says this “full of the Holy Spirit” (Lk 1,41), so the relationship is Trinitarian and aorgic, after all the Christmas event is wrapped up in the mystery of the laws of the universe that over it acted.
In the midst of the pandemic it would be extraordinary if the same mother of Pietá was with humanity in her lap (Matris in gremio) and could, in a tragic and divine inspiration, help the humanity that faints and sees an increasingly darker future ahead, the mysteries of Medjugorje and Garabandal (mysterious appearances) may not only be children’s fantasies (today all adults), but the divine revelation about the human tragic, if only it is true, where there is fear, there is salvation.
Post-God or human reinvention
13
Aug
A few days ago I read in Folha de São Paulo (in an online note) that
the famous mystical physicist Fritjof Capra (Tao of Physics) said that the pandemic is a “Pandemic is the biological response of the planet”, and also in his conference in the Frontieras debate of Thought about the “Reinvention of the human”, in which also spoke the economist Paul Collier and french writter Alain Babanckou.
In his lecture, he supposes an awakening in 2050 and visualizing the world and its post-pandemic transformations, already well defined, what he and the futurist Hazel Henderson propose are imaginable perspectives, as which relatives for the past verified as flaws and human conditions which changes they happen to be perceived, I think so, thinking about a distant scenario, I thought a much more valid reflection than thinking about next year.
In the thinking of the Austrian physical-mystic he considers that an expanded consciousness would help to overcome the cognitive limitations (and cultural addition), the mistaken assumptions and ideologies that are called back in the prices of the 20th century, and development and productivist metrics, such as the GDP, ended up allowing huge social and environmental losses and the destruction of the functions of planetary exosystems.
Little is said about the persistence of Religions and the answers they too can give and the role they will play in a post-pandemic stage, although nicht made explicit by the physicist and not even by economists who also come from the inorganic in the thematic conversation of the Swans, of the earth whether by chemical processes, by hands or by divine breath, the truth is that we were created, so a complete nicht eschatology will speak only of the post-human, but of the pre-human.
Where do we come from, from the dust of the planets, now that we can look at thousands across the cosmos like telescopes that are like the reinvention of Galileo’s spyglass that shook the 17th century, we are now looking at an infinitely more enigmatic, like particles of God and as a collapse of matter in black holes, what awaits us is not just a post-God, but the reinvention of a cosmology capable of also giving man his crisis, whose pandemic is just a symptom.
Peter Sloterdij wrote in his “Post-God”, that Greek mythology: “had predicted the revenge of time against eternity from afar, when the allusion that even the immortal gods would have to learn to live with a destiny of higher order ”(Sloterijk, 2019, p. 12) and the Greeks called this Moira, but this destiny also foresees the eschatological Matris in Gremio, described by Sloterdijk himself in“ Spheres I: bubbles ”(see our post).
Taking advantage of the allusion to the rebellious nature of Fritjof Capra, and if it has not yet taken place completely, the post-pandemic can predict an aortic rebellion from outside the planet, and if Moira still wants to have one last word, which was three and not just a Cloto, Láquesis and the Atropos, that wove the threads of the destiny (figure).
While Cloto means to spin, Láquesis means to draw, remember the meaning of Fortuna for the Greeks, and, Atropos, means to move away, in an eschatological sense, that is to say an end, but not an end, it may be that after everything ultimate end and then there is a new hope, perhaps a new “enlightenment”.
Whatever these departures from reality are, they all become important in a tragic moment, after all tragedy is not what it seems, and the romanticism and illusion of modernity is what showed its true face of horror, wrapped in beautiful words, promises of happiness and “well-being”.
Christians, in which I include myself, aware of this “night of God”, have hope for a new aortic manifestation, after all it is at the beginning of human life and should also be in this reinvention of the human for a planet that is home to everyone and not just a few.
Sloterdijk, Peter. (2019) Pós-Deus (Post-God). Trad. Markus A. Hediger. RJ: Vozes.
The eschatology of goodness
24
Jul
Just as any worldview has some allegory for the beginning and end, in the case
of the Christian Genesis and Heaven and Hell, and others propose that we are born of plants or animals, or that we come back to life through reincarnation, the good has its eschatology, while evil is a symbolic “structure”.
It is not just the definition of religious views, also in the classical philosophy Plato in the Republic and Aristotle in Ethics, Nicomachus addressed the issue and we have already made some posts here, but it was Democritus who defined our current situation more closely, saying that good depends of man’s inner desire, the good man not only practices good, but always desires it.
So it is in human history too, without historical determinism or romanticism, we walk for good if we exercise from within each man, but socially practicing what the Greeks called “virtue”, but we also have the vicious cycle of evil.
The vicious cycle of evil leads to a “crisis” of good, symbolic evil can be structured in such a way that a given social structure can lead to an end, it can be the end of an era that is very tragic, but it can also lead to a serious civilizing crisis if there is no way out.
Humanity has always found ways out, this gives hope, but tragedies are part of the change, and the severity of the tragedy depends on the resilience of good, although it is fragile that can indicate the new path, a way out for earthly citizenship, for the future human civilizing.
Biblical reading indicates three metaphors for the eschatology of goodness, and compares the “kingdom of heaven” (Mt 13, 24-43) with the planting of the growing tares and wheat that should only be harvested and separated from the eschatological end. mal (the chaff), the second parable the mustard seed, the smallest of the seeds, which gives a beautiful and leafy tree where “the birds come to make their nests”, and the third is a bread recipe, a woman mixes three portions of flour.
The third “parable” the woman mixes three portions of flour, one part should only be fermented, those would be those that have the virtue of good and it should be practiced in order to produce good fermentation in the rest of the dough, the other two portions, then yeast is good.
Evil and humanism in crisis
22
Jul
Idealism continues to defend its ideology of State, of Ethics (morals and virtues
are other things, for example, ending corruption), now defending nations, a stronger State (left and right in the bottom want this) and for this reason one can speak of the zoon politikon, Aristotle’s political animal, then it is necessary to understand what the political animal is.
There are two conditions that may not become political: being degressed (we would say excluded today) or being superhuman (or divine, thus of a higher order than human laws and rules).
This is the first premise to understand “Rules for the Human Park – a response to Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism”, it is not, therefore, about seeing man as a “bug” in the zoo, but as a “natural” animal but that his humanism is in check.
The controversy that followed his speech at the castle of Elmau in Bavaria meant that the attempt (from the schools of Plato and Aristotle) to program history and humanism through social engineering failed, another important issue is the “domestication” issue.
Domestication is also not new, the philosopher received a direct influence from Nietzsche, and Foucault also addressed the topic, his proposal at the Conference that later became a book, was to reverse Heidegger’s priority of the ontological dimension over ontics (Sloterdijk, 1999,).
The controversial cause is because the philosopher wondered if we would not pass from the fatality “from birth to chosen birth and prenatal selection” (Sloterdijk, 2000) which was the main point of the controversy trying to show this the Nazi and fascist ideas of the war period .
The issues of genetic manipulation, which in Germany suffered strict restrictions until 2002 and the leadership of the Frankfurt School by Haberrmas were the background of this controversy, but what is fundamental is the humanism of Heidegger and Levinas, the theme of the Elmau conference is a main aspect, forgotten by many commentators, because humanism is really in crisis.
As for Sloterdijk’s response, he himself returns to the theme of in Spheres I differently when speaking of an aortic manifestation, the inorganic over the organic, after all, man came from Earth even by the biblical metaphor, so from the inorganic clay God “blew” the nostrils and introduced the spirit, like it or not, the theme is metaphysical and not religious, and if something aortic happens.
Time will not be the first time in history, man came after the heavens, the earth and the waters, again also in the various cosmogonies (even non-Christian) and the earth itself has already had other manifestations, such as the one that eliminated the dinosaurs, because a new one cannot occur, and it helps us to face the period (or civilization) crisis that we face.
The weather is different from ours; the comet returns after 6,800 years to visit us, we didn’t even have a record of it, and when it returns after another 6,800 years what it finds, only God knows, now is neowise (see the picture).
The reason and the evil
16
Jul
To demonstrate two truths, Agostinho de Hipona wrote a few pages in his book
“On Free Will”, practically the whole book II (from chapters 3 to 17), where we concluded all the goods processed by God, including the free- agency, and the question is welcome must be given to man.
Both Augustine (De Trinitate) and Boethius (Opuscula) defend the cooperation between faith and reason, but it will be in the High Middle Ages that Tomás de Aquino and also Duns Scotto, in different variations (realist and nominalist) defender that the use of reason is complementary of faith.
While Tomás de Aquino defends a distinction between Being and essence, Scotus will elaborate a law of analogy, which states that we cannot conceive or that it is something that does not exist, as a thing that exists (is) that it is (qui est).
What is important in both Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotto is a complementarity between faith and reason, as an idea that Descartes, Kant, Leibniz and Hobbes are heirs of them being too simplistic, or that they will be replaced by cases of faith, by rational arguments , or fact that is important, must be studied from the ontological aspects.
Thus, the ontological argument was corrected by Franz Brentano, incorrectly called a neo-Thomist, as only one subcategory “went up” to “being” which is consciousness, a hermeneutics and the phenomenology that is taken up from it, and remains in Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer is an ontological philosophy, having in common a metaphysical question of Being.
Hanna Arendt and Paul Ricoeur, who come from these changes, return to the question of “evil”, but as questions of reason and all modern literature is analyzed (Descartes, Kant and Hegel).
The struggle of good against evil, weaknesses of good
15
Jul
The evil in Augustine of Hippo in book VII of the Confessions, is the absence of
good, just as the entire universe is ordered, although now we discover a universe with energy and dark mass, black holes, semi-new and galaxies disappearing and appearing, and many laws new in astrophysics, even so, there is a hierarchy, where some things stand out from others, and that is what Augustine drew attention to, and there was already in Augustine the question of free will.
But a tough lesson even for religious like Augustine, who abandoned the Manichean philosophy, is the struggle between good and evil, and this still dominates part of the philosophical dualism, where being inferior is not being evil, there are inferior good things and things more superiors, so the important thing is the loss of sense of what is good or bad, what Hanna Arendt called “The banality of evil” (Companhia das Letras, 1999), so someone can do something “inferior” without being “evil ”.
Those who want to give life pure delight, or who claim that it makes sense in a life well lived if we are “productive” and “active”, inspired by myths like a superior IQ or fortuitous inheritance, fortune in the Greek sense is different, even if this is done by oppressive means, where arguably the racial argument is the most disgusting of all, but where do these myths come from.
One of the great myths that has arisen since antiquity is Odyssey of Odyssey and Iliad (chants VIII of Odyssey and IX of Iliad), which means a symbol of man’s ability to overcome adversity, although there is the character Odysseus (the Greek name of Ulysses), would be born in Ithaca, son of King Laerte, who reigned in Anticléia.
Although James Joyce’s Ulysses, written from 1914 to 1921, speaks of a character Leopold Blum, considered by the author to be a modern man who is both strong and weak, cautious and rash, hero and coward, in an attempt to create a human being representative of humanity, however, is actually the modern lonely hero, an exquisite Don Quixote.
The contextualization of the Greek epic hero and the modern “hero” are, however, different, so to read Ulysses by Joyce it is necessary almost a script, which even some were made.
It was the psychologist Carl Yung who called attention to the “monologue” aspect of Joyce’s Ulysses, although he looks like an “ordinary” man, he is a single man and his “struggle”, warned Yung: “What is so scary about Ulysses it is the fact that, behind a thousand veils, nothing is hidden; of being neither turned to the mind nor to the world, but, as cold as the moon seen from the cosmic space, allows the drama of growth, being and decay to take its course ”, this is the modern myth.
The heroes who appeared in the pandemic are not heroes of “war” or immortal myths, they are not immune to the pandemic themselves and live with fear, and even family isolation, what they should think about is the life worth living. for everyone, for the planet and for health.
JUNG, Carl Gustav. Ulysses: A Monologue, UK: Haskel House, 1977.
The Question of Evil in History
14
Jul
A hermeneutic philosopher Jan Patocka, is quoted by Ricoeur, although it is
not directly linked to evil, it can give a Socratic origin to the question of the question of evil: “The loss of ‘sense’ is not the fall in ‘nonsense’, but access to the quality of meaning implied in the search itself. Jan Patocka thus rediscovers the Socratic theme of ‘soul care’ and ‘examined life’ “(Ricoeur, 1999, p. 16), is in the preface to Jan Patocka’s book “ Heretical Essay on the History of Philosophy”
Plato elaborated the Sumo well, which in fact is the elaboration of an ethics, the Good and Beautiful must be sought by the moral subject to harmonize internally, and be aware of the Good, in that sense that the care of the soul can be thought of and Socrates’ examined life.
Aristotle elaborates his famous Nicomachean Ethics, where he explores the idea of the search for virtue, so the natural man is not good, it is through the practice of virtues that he becomes good, but both in Plato and in Aristotle this virtue has a social meaning , although it is confused with morals, it is not.
The sense of moral evil, in the sense of vices of the soul, is elaborated in Augustine of Hippo, in book VII entitled “The idea of God and the Origin of evil”, evil is disorderly agape (different from the philosophy of eros and filia), so it is in the absence of the choice of higher things to choose the lower ones (this is the deepest sense of agape), that we adhere to vices, and disharmonize.
Although the theme can be found in several medieval authors, such as Tomás de Aquino and Duns Scotto, the sense of evil is deepened in the theistic sense and the philosophical is linked to Plato’s Ethics, remaining the idea of virtue, worked around the Ethics of Aristotle, wrote Thomas Aquinas: “Virtue designates a certain perfection of potency”, (Summa Theológica, 1st section, 2nd part, q. 55 a.1).
In modern times, it is Paul Ricoeur who takes up the issue in his book “The symbolic of evil”, but it is in the delicate passage from the Renaissance to Modernity that the distance between moral and ethical evil is deepened and confused, as if they were the same, leaving the virtue of being thought out.
RICOEUR, P. Prefácio a PATOCKA, J. – Essais hérétiques sur la philosophie de l’histoire. Trad. Erika Abrams, Lagrasse: Verdier, 1999.
The veiling of knowledge, night of thought ’
09
Jul
Arrábida’s Charter of Transdisciplinarity, written by the physicist Nicolescu Barsarabi,
the Portuguese serigraphist Lima de Freitas and Edgar Morin, points out the process (prior to the Web), where excessive specialization and an impoverishment of Being created a veiling of thought, says the letter :
“… The contemporary rupture between an increasingly accumulative knowledge and an increasingly impoverished inner being leads to the rise of a new obscurantism, whose consequences on the individual and social level are incalculable.” (Arrábida, Portugal, 1994).
The problem then is how to create a knowledge that unites and a worldview that expands the impoverished and brutish human spirit, according to Morin’s own recipe: “it is necessary to replace a thought that isolates and separates with a thought that distinguishes and unites”.
All polarization and barriers between different thoughts are the root where dialogue is ignored, even if sometimes stated, the semantic closure of thought, whatever the principles and often moral, religious and even cultural are important, must exceed the pre-conceptions (in sense of Gadamer) and meet the positive in the Other.
The Letter of Arrábida says in article 14: “The opening involves the acceptance of ignorance, the unexpected and the unpredictable. Tolerance is the recognition of the right to ideas and truths contrary to ours ”, this is the meaning of replacing a thought“ that isolates and separates ”with another that“ distinguishes and unites ”, having a difference does not mean isolating or even separating.
It is the totalitarian idea of the single truth, even if religious, pragmatic or scientific, that often isolates and does not unite, in grounded dialogues there are always new elements to be considered and rarely are they properly heard and respected.
Physicist Barsarab Nicolescu, one of the signatories to the Arrábida Charter, in his own Charter of Transdisciplinarity, regarding quantum physics wrote: “… where does this blindness come from? Where does this perpetual desire to do the new with the old come from? The irreducible novelty of quantum vision continues to belong to a small elite of leading scientists ”, although the physical reality proves and surprises it.
Barsarab said in that his Manifest about “reality”, “In our century, Husserl and some other researchers, in an effort to question the foundations of science, discovered the existence of different levels of perception of Reality by the observing subject”, more than that the observer is part of the experiment, of the whole, and is not neutral.
All of our logic and actions are based on three axioms: The axiom of identity: A is A, The axiom of non-contradiction: A is not non-A; and the third is called the axiom of the excluded third: there is no third term T (T for “included third”) that is both A and non-A.
What Nicolescu says is what would happen if we became the included third, that’s what Stefan Lupascu (1900-1988) did when creating the logic of the included third (tertium non datur), including the T-state that is neither “current” nor “potential”, they replace the classic logic of “true” or “false”, and create a more generalized level that includes physics, epistemology and what is “consciousness”.
NICOLESCU, Barsarab. Transdisciplinarity and Complexity : Levels of Reality as Source of Indeterminacy. Available in: https://ciret-transdisciplinarity.org/bulletin/b15c4.php access: July 2020.
Innocence, naivety and ignorance
03
Jul
In many situations we stumble on these three concepts as synonyms or close ones,
they are not, a child is innocence and does not know many subjects, but he is not ignorant, for his naivete he must be protected both by his parents and by any person of good character.
An adult can also be innocent in a certain situation because he was not part of or did not know a serious situation, he is not ignorant, but innocent even though some harm may have occurred due to his ingenuity in not realizing the seriousness or the consequences of an act.
Ignorance is militant, that is, even seeing and understanding the seriousness of a given situation, a conscious voluntary action commits or allows a serious act to be carried out, and some or many people or even serious situations can occur.
The pandemic exposed these three realities and one cannot fail to notice a disease with the severity of taking lives and whose defense is complex due to the lack of knowledge about the action and control of the coronavirus implies making decisions in defense of life that mitigate the number of deaths.
Just as it exposes the naivety of many people who do not take care of hygiene and prevention to minimize the contagion, exposing innocent people, but it is ignorance that worries most and can cause even more serious situations if it is not possible to stop neglect. Ignorance was used in history to manipulate innocent populations and often managed to lead many naive people to catastrophic situations, striking innocents and often leading to death and despair, this happened in wars and pandemics, the Spanish flu in the 1918s and 1919 killed 50 million people, an absurd number for the population at the time.
The biblical revelation in which the apostle Matthew (Mt 11.25) states that it was his father’s pleasure to reveal himself to the little ones and to hide the divine truths from the “wise and understanding”, must be understood in the context of belief in God.
God eternal knowledge and not about knowledge and temporal truths, because the following text is very clear (Mt 11: 26-27): “Yes, Father, because that was your pleasure. Verything was delivered to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son, except the Father, and no one knows the Father, except the Son and the one to whom the Son wants to reveal him.
Using this passage to justify or defend ignorance is bad faith, in both senses, in the religious and in the moral sense.
The development of science and the epistemic crisis
01
Jul
Several ideas and news spread among the peoples and become dogmas 
and legends since the origin of humanity, however it was the organization of knowledge that organized the episteme, the doxa its a single opinion.
The first great scientific question raised by Boethius in the seventh century, was whether or not there are universal or just private categories, this question gave rise to a dispute between nominalists like Duns Scotto and William Ockham who argued that “names” were universal, and realistic. like Thomas Aquinas, who said the real be.
Roger Bacon (1220-1292) defended experimentation as a source of knowledge, and together with Duns Scotto and William de Ockham they create the empiricist basis of thought, and so knowledge does not depend only on faith, but also our senses.
With his philosophical operation called “methodical doubt”, René Descartes ended up instituting a philosophical paradigm that was identified as conceptual pragmatism, and John Locke, representative of the empiricist current, and René Descartes, founder of the Cartesian method, converged in their theories when they stated that the valid knowledge comes from experience and the senses, as they are innate to the soul.
Kant’s idealism will create 12 categories separated into 4 groups, that of Quantity (Unit, Plurality and wholeness), Quality (Reality, Denial and Limitation), the relationship (Substance, Causality and Community), Modality (Possibility, Existence and Necessity), and in them the phenomena fill the empty forms.
Thus, the phenomena can only be considered within the categories, differently from the phenomenology that directs consciousness to the thing itself, that is, it returns to the beings, and this will open a new possibility for metaphysics.
Despite strong signs of a crisis in thought, mathematics changes with the emergence of non-Euclidean geometries, the fourth dimension, physics with the uncertainty principle where the theory of relativity and quantum physics came from, the logical paradoxes presented in Vienna circle and mainly a crisis in humanist thought, showed an early 20th century in crisis, but two wars and the cold war were not avoided.
The fall of the Berlin wall, an apparent end to the ideological struggle, has given rise to new crises now in the world of culture, the war in Iran, Afghanistan and the permanent one in many Arab countries have now shown an East vs. West tension.
The pandemic should solidarize the peoples, in fact it created a more serious ideological polarization, the danger of totalitarian regimes emerging with greater force, it is necessary to have hope and fight for a more solidary world and a humanism worthy of the name
