Arquivo para a ‘Noosfera’ Categoria
Pain and its meaning
04
Mar
In his book “Palliative Society: Pain Today”,
Byung-Chul Han characterizes the being who has “objectified pain” as one who lives in a “purely bodily affliction”, because being “endowed with meaning [Sinnhaftigkeit] pain presupposes a narrative that inserts life into a horizon of meaning”, so without a bodily life linked to a greater meaning it is “a bare life emptied of meaning, which no longer narrates” (Han, 2021, p. 46).
He quotes Walter Benjamin, in Images of Thought, where he shows the healing power of narration: “The child is sick. The mother brings her to bed and sits down beside her. And then she begins to tell stories” (p. 47), at least that’s what used to be done in the old days, before taking the child to the doctor.
As we quoted in last month’s blog: “today we live in a post-narrative time” (p. 48), “the hypersensitive human being of late modernity, who suffers senseless pain … that wave of pain in which the spirit recognizes its impotence sinks rapidly today” (p. 49).
He also quotes E. Jünger’s “On Pain”: “The human being deludes himself that he is safe, while it is only a matter of time before he is dragged into the abyss by the elements” (p. 55).
Jünger explains that pain cannot be made to disappear, he speaks of an “economy of pain, if placed in the background in this way, it appears hidden in an ‘invisible capital’, which ‘increases with interest and interest on interest’. Paraphrasing Hegel’s “cunning of reason”, Jünger postulates the “cunning of pain”, in this way, it is not autocratic power, but pain that has not been objectified in some form of domination.
He writes, quoting Jünger: “No claim is more certain than that which pain has on life. Where pain is spared, equilibrium is restored according to the laws of an entirely determined economy” (pp. 55-56).
Thus it is possible to speak, according to the author, “borrowing a well-known expression, of a ‘cunning of pain’, which achieves its goal by all means” (p. 56), “… the scattered light with which pain, in return, begins to fill the space” (idem), only if this light is outside our objectified “security” (that linked to material goods and comforts) can we find another, more lasting type of ‘conquests’, which are not objectifiable.
The author goes on to explain that “in a palliative society hostile to pain, silent pains multiply, crowded into the margins, persisting in an absence of meaning, speech and image” (p. 57).
Far from narcissism and selfishness, we find a meaning to pain, we find more than a meaning, a reward that comes from our solidarity, from the encounter with the Other and with the true happiness of life in the family, in the community and in true security.
Han, B. C. (2021) Paliative Society: pain today. Transl. Lucas Machado, Brazil, Petrópolis: Ed. Vozes.
A significant milestone for this blog
01
Mar
In February, we reached a milestone of 
almost two thousand hits a day on our content, 55,980 in total. If we had just 20 more hits, we would have reached exactly 56,000, which divided by the 28 days of February would give us 2,000 hits a day.
The main concern of this blog is to maintain a healthy culture of dialogue, respecting the different positions, trying to divert the current polarization without omitting the excesses and outbursts of hatred and bravery that characterize the contemporary world and without forgetting good culture.
We don’t omit our Christian vision, which in our view should be one of dialogue and respect for all other cultures, ecumenism with other religions and the defense of life, greater social justice and the reaffirmation of scientific culture, without forgetting that it depends on method and not opting for the current polarization that distorts true scientific knowledge, ignores original cultures and other peoples who have their own culture in their development.
I would also clarify that our vision of Christianity involves true spirituality and recognizes a culture confused about its true roots: solidarity, humanitarianism and empathy between peoples. Fundamentalism has nothing to do with orthodoxy, which recognizes as theological values: charity (infuse), true hope (Psalm 146:5, Jeremiah 17:7,8, Ephesians: 1, 18) and true faith that believes in the historical and divine truth of Jesus.
We will never deny science and good culture, remembering that they need method and good storytelling, a theme that is almost always present in our analysis of today’s society and culture.
But our central concern in the contemporary world is peace, empathy and justice.
Thank you to my readers, especially those who, while disagreeing, keep the dialog going!!!
Evil and its ontological meaning
27
Feb
Every analysis of the contemporary world is
permeated (if not itself) by a Manichaean sense: the struggle of good against evil, and this depends on the particular narrative.
Manichaeism presents good and evil as a basic question for understanding the universe, as opposing forces such as action and reaction, or attraction and repulsion – you could list a large number of contemporary books that describe reality in this way.
Here we are interested in two essential points: the religious sense and the political sense. In the religious world there is a growing discourse that “we are good against evil”, but a good reading of patristics (the religious of the early Christian era) helps us to understand that this is not the case.
Augustine of Hippo (354-430), who was a Manichaean for nine years, saw in Manichaeism the struggle between the soul and the body and thus justified the struggle between good and evil, but he revised this position under the strong influence of Ambrose of Milan (340-397), who was to exert a strong influence on Augustine, one of whose phrases was: “Tears do not ask for forgiveness, but achieve it” and so they achieve good.
Thus, Augustine began to give evil an ontological meaning, understanding that body and soul are related, saying: “However, I had no clear idea of the cause of evil. However, whatever it was, looking for it couldn’t force me to take an immutable God as mutable, if I didn’t want to become what I was looking for. That’s why, in my peaceful search, I was certain of the falsity of the doctrine of those from whom I had turned away out of conviction. I really saw that they were studying the problem of the origin of evil, being themselves immersed in malice, to the point of preferring to imagine your substance subject to evil, rather than recognizing themselves capable of committing it” (Augustine, 2014, p. 172) in other words, they achieve good.
It is also necessary, for an in-depth analysis, to read: “The Nature of Good”, “Free Will” to understand the problem of human freedom which can refuse to do good and free will which is this freedom of choice, but Confessions is his main work.
Augustine wanted to break away from dualism and in Confessions (pp. 174-175) he develops the idea that evil is not a substance, because if it were a substance, it would be a good. And, in fact, it would be an incorruptible substance and, therefore, undoubtedly a great good, and so what was corruptible and subject to deterioration has no eternal existence, so he exchanges his Manichaeism for Christianity.
Seen from the perspective of modern narratives that seek to deny the existence of the incorruptible and thus admit the existence of God or at least something incorruptible that gives substance to the cosmos, Byung-Chul Han says of modern narrative: “We live today in a post-narrative time. Not narration [Erzählung], but counting [Zählung] determines our life. Narrative is the capacity of the spirit to overcome the contingency of the body” (Sociedade Paliativa: a dor hoje, 2021, Brazil, ed. Vozes).
In order to justify all disaffection, we need a narrative; if we escape from it, we do good.
Agostinho. Confissões. Tradução de Maria Luiza Jardim Amarante. São Paulo: Paulus, 2014.
Being, language and the word
20
Feb
The true meaning of the word, and
consequently of language, has always been a theme of human thought. Heidegger considers it to be a characteristic element of our humanity, from which the truth of being is unveiled (the veil is removed).
In the High Middle Ages, nominalists and realists were divided over its importance. Nominalists saw that no metaphysical substance is hidden behind words, that the supposed essentials are nothing more than words or signs that represent things that are always singular.
Realism, on the other hand, is a term that can refer to different concepts, depending on the concept, so this current in philosophy defends the existence of an objective reality, which does not depend on the human mind, this objectivity built modern thought.
Although it was a reaction to romanticism, especially in literature and art in Europe, especially in France at the end of the 19th century, in the 20th century there was a certain return to nominalism, through the so-called linguistic turn, its main characteristic being the relationship between language and thought as an object of philosophical investigation.
Thus, the word and language are part of the human essence, and the dualism of objectivity vs. subjectivity is called into question, even though much of thought is tied to this concept of early modernity, where objectivity predominates.
It is language and words that are used before weapons and growing hatreds are used, it is our relationship with the Other, with objects and with everyday life, what words we follow, linguistic variations are the result of social, geographical, professional and situational factors, so the current narrative that corresponds to an impoverishment of language is the result of human impoverishment and the deterioration of social relations.
The exponential number of mental illnesses that already affect not only adults, but also school-age children, affect the difficulty of verbal communication, so it is necessary to take care of language, which is sometimes aggressive and even litigious.
Biblical wisdom reminds us (Mt 15:17-18): “Do you not understand that whatever goes into the mouth goes into the belly, and then is thrown into an obscure place? But what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart, and that is what defiles a man”.
Let’s pay more attention to what we say, how we address the Other, our capacity for listening and dialog, looking for those words that bring growth and wisdom and always seeking an empathetic relationship to communicate something important.
Pay attention to words, especially those that bring wisdom, common sense and empathy.
The third included and the counterpoint to the crisis
19
Feb
It is no longer the Copernican and
Newtonian models that explain the universe, the center of the galaxy has a black hole, whose laws of operation still challenge astrophysics and even quantum physics, the simple operation by mechanical laws described at the beginning of modern science have already fallen apart, although mechanistic reasoning has a social survival.
Philosophy has already returned to the question of Being and essence, although the majority of dialogues and articles still discuss empiricist science and the idealism of Parmenides (460 BC – 530 BC), according to Popper, he and Xenophanes made a pre-project of modern enlightenment (The World of Parmenides: Essays on Pre-Socratic Enlightenment, Karl Popper), the Renaissance tried to return to Greek originality.
For Popper, both the Critical Science that Aristotle had built, as well as the philosophy of nature and the theory of nature, the great original attempts at cosmology collapsed after Aristotle, and the modern age, starting with Newton, formulates a physics that modifies part of the cosmological vision, But quantum physics and the theory of relativity destroy this model and go beyond the idealist/Enlightenment model of the logic of non-contradiction (Being is and non-being is not), creating a third included (the logic of Stéphane Lupasco and the physics of Barsarab Nicolescu).
They create new paradigms by changing the model of absolute time and space (which is now relative) and understanding quantum states of particles, discovering tunneling (a third state between quantum particles) and wormholes (non-absolute spaces that can open up in the movement of celestial bodies), see the movie Contact from Carl Sagan’s novel of the same name.
The Aristotelian logic that justified a third term has collapsed and with it the Manichean, scientific and fundamentalist logics, a clearing is opening up, larger than Heidegger would have imagined in his “Forest Paths”.
The meaning of the clearing in Heidegger’s Dasein (being-there) is a metaphor for an opening in the forest that symbolizes human experience, a static field (figure above) where we move and try to see this experience clearly (image ‘Plan Générique’ by Fotis Ifantidis).
The great clearing promises to open up in a world of conflicts of all kinds, which will at some point have a “broad” light, science itself will see the serious epistemological divergences, from an archaic scientism to pure philosophical speculation, which hides under the idea of science, which ignores the true transcendence (not the scientific one) of humanity.
The root of the social crisis is revealed within the ancient frameworks of scientific, religious and political fundamentalism, it will need to create an even greater crisis that will make humanity wake up from its idealist/Enlightenment slumber and turn towards the good (see previous post) and flee from narratives.
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Ethical, moral and cardinal virtues
05
Feb
Ethics are important for good social
interaction and for the proper functioning of human relationships in the social context. They should be the basis for those who today challenge moral relationships and distance them from the cardinal virtues, due to their religious origins.
Some principles are considered central to ethics, such as autonomy, beneficence or non-maleficence (speaking badly or bearing false witness) and justice, which should be the basis for good social relations.
In times of moral relativism, political relativism is once again a topic. Perhaps we need to return to classical Greek principles in order to bring some serenity to today’s social debate.
Aristotelian ethics was centered on the pursuit of happiness and human well-being, through virtue (areté) and moral development.
The Greek areté means both virtue and excellence, and Plato and Aristotle’s quest was to form “upstanding” citizens who could strengthen society morally, and overcome politics, which until this time was strongly influenced by the sophists, discursive arguments that favored the powerful regardless of their attitudes.
Relativism was born there, seeking only to justify power through argumentation, and the strong similarity with today’s narratives indicates that some fissure in the political stance is spreading in modern democracy.
The ancient Greeks had to overcome relativism in order to arrive at democracy, they argued that moral values and truths could not be relative to historical and social contexts.
Plato’s Theaetetus is considered to be one of the first texts to address the confrontation between truth and relativism, and it would be great to re-study it for today’s politics, how much relativism !!!
The cardinal virtues must be seen as a complement, without them we will not achieve true fraternity and unity of peoples, love is emptied by the current vulgarization, we have already discussed the English philosopher Philippa Foot (1920-2010) clearly addressed the gap that exists in contemporary morality of the cardinal virtues: courage, prudence and temperance (to be more serene, how much this is lacking today) in addition to justice that is partially addressed.
Without the cardinal virtues we find it difficult to include and live in peace with everyone.
The peace of those who love
15
Jan
I give you peace, but not as the world gives,
says biblical wisdom (John 14:27), and what kind of peace this is, it is clearly not what we call peace between nations and peoples.
We have already mentioned here, the so-called Iberian peace, in Sassanid (527-531), which became without return to war, and in dark periods for human peace it would be altruism or innocence to think of peace
Say what you think, maintain coherence in actions and words, justice and values are not only valid for your group or nation, they must be coherent values that are practical always and with everyone, independent of narratives and political and social polarities, it is necessary to have wisdom in what you say and prudence in what you do, And the pure release of feelings is not healthy and requires a dose of empathy and love from those who always do.
If you correct, correct for love, if you remain silent, be silent for love, it is often wise to be silent, and it does not always mean indifference or omission, it is also wisdom and prudence, the virtues that we have already discussed here and that were treated with propriety by the philosopher Philippa Foot.
Love contains all the virtues, but the word has been emptied in contemporaneity, it is even synonymous with hypocrisy and exclusion, evil is done and “I did it for love”, so it is necessary today to understand the other virtues that are embedded in true love.
There is also the appeal to ignorance, more than an appeal there is a lack of knowledge, misinformation is just a consequence of the lack of wisdom, and it is not just on one side of the narrative.
Modern narratives are in fashion, social media tools help to propagate them with quick reasoning and phrases, it is just a matter of denying what the Other says, it is the result of a long process of ignorance.
The peace we long for is the peace of love, but it must come containing the cardinal virtues: justice (the divine), prudence, temperance and courage (fortitude).
Love: the neighbor and the partner
08
Jan
One of the hardest chapters in the fall of
civilization is the transformation of the concept of love. There are even pathologies that live off the cancellation of this relationship, but the basis is the transformation into interest, where interests matter more than any kind of empathy or affection.
Paul Ricoeur was the philosopher who directly addressed this issue in his book “History and Truth”, which I would say is a complement to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s book “Truth and Method”.
Selfishness, closing oneself off in vicious circles, opens up chasms of separation with the Other, there is no other word that better defines exclusion, it is this that leads to disbelief in love of neighbor and paves the way for relationships of interest, in short, relationships of money.
What might otherwise have seemed unthinkable, now economic relations create concentric circles, power structures and even urban gangs related to money, and it is these that deteriorate the social base, destroy empathetic relations and create relations of dispute and hatred between groups, at the base of the “brain rot” is the whole of these social relations.
To explain this, Ricoeur talks about charity: “Charity does not have to be where it appears; it is also hidden in the humble and abstract post office, the welfare office; it is often the hidden part of the social”, Paul Ricoeur in Le socius et le Prochain (1954), and is translated in the 1968 book History and Truth.
In Gadamer’s book, what we will find is how to make these relationships when reading a text, or in an ongoing dialog on a given topic, we need a “fusion of horizons”, before the dialog, what the Greeks primarily called époque, that is, making a void in order to listen and dialog with the Other.
This exercise is difficult, not to say almost impossible in a polarized society and any discourse on love is mere rhetoric, at the root of which is “segregating” the Other.
So those who remain in charity, in dialogue and in understanding, have the property to speak of Love.
Witnessing and acting in peace
03
Jan
It may seem that peace, seen as a new way
of thinking about personal and social relationships, is something intimate or purely “interior” (it is a complement to exteriority), but it is not, because it is possible to act according to this peace that is different from that conceived as only human.
This inner peace, which is not what we developed in the previous post, is not what the Greeks called ataxia, peace of mind free from fear, nor aponia, absence of pain, which would be the ideal states of life; pain and fear do exist, especially at times of crisis.
In fact, it is this bad relationship with pain and fear that makes society sink deeper into its crisis, the pursuit of pleasure without measure and the absence of fear in daily attitudes and actions that are contrary to peace in the world; wars begin with small actions of hatred.
Committing to peace, in the realm of truth, can even put your life at risk, as Thomas Aquinas says: “Whoever tells the truth loses friendships”, but it must be said that his truth is not logical but onto-logical, in other words, it follows a logic of Being.
In previous posts, we returned to the question of the cardinal virtues, pointed out in particular by Philippa Foot (English philosopher). In Thomas Aquinas, we find the connection between peace and these virtues: justice, wisdom, prudence and charity. For the Aquinate, peace is achieved in the midst of men if these virtues help to produce the peace desired by humanity.
Thomas Aquinas also understands peace in a broader sense: “peace is the tranquillity of manner, of species and of order” (Aquinas, 2019) (It is worth noting that by order, we mean that each thing is in its proper place).
Thus, along with the virtues of justice, wisdom and prudence, there must be the bond of charity, which is not simply worldly love or appreciation. Charity not only unifies the appetites of individuals, it also leads each man to love his neighbor as himself, that is, to want to fulfill the desires and needs of his neighbor as if they were his own.
The Angelic Doctor says: “Peace is nothing other than the unity of affections, which is proper to God alone, because it is through charity – which only comes from God – that hearts are united. In fact, God knows how to bring together and unite, because God is Love, which is the bond of perfection” (Aquinas 2019).
So this desired peace depends on more than divine love, putting it into practice in our lives and in our daily lives, illuminating conflicting relationships with concord and unity.
SANTO TOMAS DE AQUINO. Corpus Thomisticum. [S. l.]: Fundação Tomás de Aquino, 2019. Available in: http://www.corpusthomisticum.org, access: december 2024.
Remaining at peace
02
Jan
January 1st is known as the World Day of Peace.
We didn’t post yesterday because it was a public holiday, but we did look at four books that we’ll be reading and posting throughout the year.
We’ve already talked about the peace of the unknown (to most) Sassanids, called the Iberian peace (527-531) and about Christian peace: “I give you peace, but not as the world gives” (Jn 14:27), the dark signs of the coming year are indicative of a better understanding of this peace.
Say what you think, try to be coherent in your actions and words, but don’t expect agreement or applause, in general the truth when it’s harsh is never well accepted, increasingly we have a world of narratives and bipolarization and everyone has their own “story”.
The popular saying goes that the first to die in a war is the truth, and if you have a fair and coherent position (this is impossible without a moral position, and I recall the cardinal virtues described by Philippa Foot), if you are a temple of peace (peace comes from above) get ready.
Also in social terms, those who get involved in conflicts, and there are many situations for this today, need to remain peaceful and have serenity and resilience.
On the other hand, those who suffer from social and economic problems imagine that a spiritual solution will do the trick, as if the divine were a house of credit or the solution to structural problems.
Look for medium and long-term alternatives, the immediate ones are panaceas, especially in financial matters, and be very careful because the winds are blowing in the opposite direction.
In short, keep your inner peace, look for practical solutions to practical things and be serene.
