Arquivo para a ‘Antropotécnica’ Categoria
Political, educational and moral virtue
18
Aug
The three distinct phases of the Greek polis can be simplified
in the political arete practiced by the sophists and which justified only the rhetorical capacity (something close to today’s narratives), the educational areté, the Platonic ideal that means a good relationship between nature and education. , but here we are interested in moral areté, the overcoming between the antagonisms of passion and reason.
We give in to the passions, so politics is a kind of twist, the passions are all free and so there is no opposition to the contradictory impulses of the soul, and these forms already existed in the classical period, but they were believed to be “domesticated” using a term from Sloterdijk.
The domestication project failed, Sloterdijk’s finding that it predates the pandemic and the war was already present and scandalized philosophers who soon refuted it under serious accusations.
There is no more room for moral virtue, even theft and verbal and “symbolic” violence already seem to be liberated, any attempt to build a solid morality is fought on the contrary.
So it’s not about the war that is the apex of this moral barbarism, killing has justifications as insane as it seems, it has twisted and even fatalists who say it was inevitable, at the limit, we hope they don’t say the erosion of civilization is also inevitable , after all, defending life is the last moral appeal we have left and even he seemed in crisis with the pandemic.
Public morality, use of public goods as a service to the community, social morality, use of empathy and tolerance as forms of dialogue and public relationship, direct opposition and contradictory, are all moral principles that seem to be in recess.
What are the sociability, representativeness and policy proposals put on the table, just the denial of moral values, disregard for public affairs and a vague defense of what public goods and the interests of the most fragile population are in fact? at the limit of security.
Cabinet speeches are dissociated from reality, demagoguery and populism are the great instruments of political propaganda, the seriousness of what is proposed does not give in to the slightest examination of the reality of the facts, and talking about fake news should be addressed to practically everyone. .
The campaign has just begun and from the non-dialogue present in the speeches, we can only think that morality has succumbed to lying moralism and fallacious populism.
The origin and crisis of humanism
17
Aug
The two wars and the current tension Russia x Ukraine and
China x Taiwan, which are nothing but the tension now between two types of colonial systems, capitalist imperialism and ideological imperialism, which is not just Marxist or communist, because this requires a discussion on the topic.
His proposal, according to Sloterdijk himself, were well understood by the participants, however in the reaction of the philosophers there was a “fascist” content in them, which is the genetic selection of humanity, or the induction of this change.
I also had this reaction in a first reading, in my case the criticism of Heidegger’s “Letters on Humanism”, one of the central themes that it addresses, in addition to the questioning it makes of the conception of humanism, its great contribution is in understanding the ontic relationship ontological, inverting Heidegger’s precedence of the ontological over the ontic.
In practice it means a revision of the clearing motif, as the incorporation of its natural history over the social one (Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 61), means that there is a natural dimension on the ontological.
Personally, I prefer not to submit one dimension to another, I say that they cooperate, something similar to what Henri Bergson wrote in his “Creative Evolution” (1907), but adhering to the mystical, and it is clear that this depends on a cosmovision with some religious background.
Sloterdijk’s review of Plato’s “Politics” (Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 47-56) develops the origins of humanism in Antiquity, in his view, linked to the exercise of an inhibition, that of the habit of reading capable of pacifying, to tame, to develop patience, in opposition to the frenetic amusements of the “uninhibited homo inhumanus”.
The Platonic metaphor supposes that these different natures are found in Being, that is, they are ontological, and as raw material to form the Greek citizen (the politician), there is the artifice of separating them in order to have the desired configuration for their function. in the polis.
It must be remembered that the Greeks also already spoke of areté, the exercise of virtue, to use Sloterdijk’s term “a life of exercises”, but the German philosopher’s view is that this project fails, and in our analysis that includes the mystic , means that there is an abandonment of areté.
Thus, I am not making a blind defense of Sloterdijk here, I only note that his criticism of humanism is to this “peacemaking” project of man, hence why the “rules of the human park”, his suggestion of ontic nature, do not necessarily mean manipulation. genetics.
Behind this question is the question whether man is good or bad, as the Enlightenment contractualists did when defining the role of the state, so Sloterdijk’s question proceeds.
People who changed the course of history
03
Aug
For centuries in the Iranian plain the Semitic and Akkadian
peoples dominated and established their civilization there, the Medes and Persians settled later and until the period between 500 BC. and 448 BC. the Persians established a domain and started conflicts with the Greeks, the so-called Medical Wars.
The city-states of Greece came together and managed to impose their cultural and society model on the peoples and started a new cultural process called Classical Antiquity, the Greek polis, art and the civilizing model would be established, including a cultural return in a later period. called renaissance.
These empires disappeared without leaving any traces and only historical records, the marks of cruelty, decadence and impiety of the warlike forces of these empires disappeared.
In times of civilizational crisis, it is good that peoples who had not only a great military force, but also a great cultural appeal, managed to change the course of history and strengthen the civilizing process in a broader democratic and cultural direction.
Great empires such as the Persians, the Roman, the Mongol empire (picture) and more recently the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires also went into crisis and succumbed, unfortunately not without wars and with great loss of civilian life and a critical analysis of wars is always important. .
Part of this story, forces that mobilize peace and dialogue took humanity from even greater scourges that could occur and if we cannot avoid wars, we can maximize efforts so that civilian human lives are spared.
History also teaches that peoples that were not empires and even numerous can and should influence the course of history from a civilizational experience, like the Greek polis and the world today lacks models that can unite humanity in a solidary effort for peace. .
In times of crisis: where is the clearing
01
Jul
Man dreams of traveling to the Earth’s “neighborhood”
that is man’s journey to Mars, James Webb will go into operation in July looking to the ends of the universe, but the closest reality within the planet is the announcement of a probable recession , even if the war ends.
So what happens before our eyes, how is it possible to find the clearing in this environment?
In the conclusions of the World Forum meeting held in May in Davos, Jane Fraser, CEO of Citigroup, one of the largest banks in the world, said: “Europe is right in the middle of the storms” and contrary to what was imagined, even though Russia face problems, the recession will be worldwide.
Long before the current crisis Edgar Morin and Patrick Viveret wrote “How to live in a time of crisis?”, the answer was to seek more solidarity and understanding did not seem to foresee a pandemic and a war, also Peter Sloterdijk when writing If Europe Awakens, looked to the lacerated post-war Europe of 1945 as a metaphor for modernity, although it foresaw a violent slide in American politics, but perhaps also did not envision a war.
The answer of everyone who goes in the herd or swarm (term used by Byung-Chul Han) to the media behaviors of our time, would be let’s go to war too, finally weapons, may seem obvious, but not for those looking for reason ex-istential of our experience.
There is no escape from reality, much less alienation, it is precisely its opposite, to find within the real the truth of what the Being is, its design and realization, within today, the only contact with eternal time, since yesterday no longer exists. and the future is now even more uncertain, not the Self.
Where would an asceticism with spirituality be, where would we look at our planetary pace, and how would we look at infinity through the eye of the James Webb telescope, with a skeptical look, of possibilities of escape or with the great that the universe reveals itself before the spark earthy?
Times of refuge, but even more especially of soul refuge, within what is the most essential of Being, to which philosophies, ideologies and even most religions do not respond, all seem to say the sameness of save yourself who can, everything is allowed and war.
Who are the closest beings around you? Where is your heart and soul in the face of such real threats? A feeling of protection or abandonment? anyway where is the clearing?
We only respond to the “truth”, that said to the mirror and not to audiences and lives, only those who find the essence of Being respond, there are fewer and fewer possible escapes.
To those who believe, it is necessary to answer Jesus’ question to his closest disciples, to those who lived next to him and shared everything, food, worries and wanderings, “who do men say that I am?” and it was Peter who answered Mt 16:16: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God”, and Jesus promises him the keys of heaven, not only as the eternal, but also “the truth”.
Popularly in Brazil we celebrate Saint John Saint Anthony with Parties, Pedro not so much.
Anthropotechnics and the two forms of domination
30
Jun
If there is a close relationship between Sloterdijk’s thought
and Heidegger and some parallel with the thought of Hans Georg Gadamer, the link between German thought and names such as Ernst Cassieer, Max Scheler, Arnold Gehler and Hellmuth Plessner leads us both to a philosophical anthropology and to the returns to an almost forgotten perspective of the “sciences of the spirit”.
Of these authors, some very close to the Nazi projects, he takes advantage of the idea of man as a deficient being, who does not have natural means (claws, teeth or horns, for example) to defend himself and must seek in artificial means, but does not differentiate them from “spiritual” means
It is not by chance that his work draws parallels with Nietzsche’s “Dead God”, the criticism of Heidegger’s humanism, but his work seeks an original anthropogenesis, and his anthropotechnics are inserted in it, especially what is written in “You have to change your life. ” where he differentiates two forms of artificial production of human behavior that have flourished since antiquity in the so-called “high cultures”, undergoing a profound transformation in modernity, the first is the production of some men by other men, which he calls techniques of “leaving -se operate”, while the second is the production of men from themselves, which would then be the “autos” – the techniques of Operation” (Sloterdijk, 2009).
On these two types of anthropotechnics, he proposes to rethink, on a basis of philosophical anthropology, the Foucauldian concepts of “biopolitics” and “aesthetics of existence”, with similar ideas in these two poles, the domestication of the other, hence his idea of the human park, and self-colonization, which his disciple Byung-Chul Han will call self-exploitation.
Sloterdijk’s basic difference is the idea of ”Improvement of the world” (Weltverbesserung) based on the improvement of populations that dominates Western theory since Plato is exchanged for a “improvement of the self” (Selbsverbesserung) and does so with the “technologies of the self”, and for this men do it as a “society of exercises”.
For Byung-Chul Han, these exercises are controlled by technologies of the “self” that each time refer to psychological exercises, and so he calls it “psychopolitics”, since they believe that it is self-realization that transforms their lives, although they practice a “self-exploitation”.
Both Foucault, Sloterdijk and Byung Chul Han, and this is at the origin of Nietzsche’s thought, that the emergence of ascetic practices provoked an anthropogenesis that divided humans into two categories: the virtuous and the non-virtuous, while in the exercise society, there is an unskilled asceticism.
É Chul Han draws attention to the categories of active life and contemplative life, based on the thoughts of Hannah Arendt and Saint Gregory of Nazianzo (or Nazianzen), Sloterdijk is stuck in his criticism of Scheler, who sees only the person as “ something” besides his acts, and in this he sees a “spirit”.
SLOTERDIJK, P. (2018) Tens de mudar sua vida. Lisboa: Relógio d´Água.
Being, clearing and humanism
29
Jun
In the context in which Heidegger wrote Being and Time,
it is what remains hidden within a whole, where being should emerge, this is appropriate to the discourse of modernity where there is a reduction to human material life, and a division between what it is subjective and objective in Being.
This fragmentation emerges only in one part, most of the time it is opposite to the entity to which the being belongs, explaining in a different way, making a joke: “the being of the entity”.
Being and being are intertwined, being is conditioned by being, since it has a broader sense, this broader definition Heidegger defined as Dasein, or being-there to say this fact that there is a cosmovision of being in relation to a context broader scope of your experience.
However, far from a solution to the paradox of modernity, what Heidegger called the manifestation of being through language, including poetics as one of the functions of language, making there an abode of being, which would preserve the ex-tactician naming in the clearing.
The clearing would be nothing more than the truth of being, that is, it would remove us from the abyss of our ex-sistent essence, and the clearing would give us back the “world” and language is the advent that reveals and clears up being itself, but Sloterdijk responding to its clearing in Heidegger’s Letters for Humanism, he makes an answer in the book Rules for the Human Park, saying of the failure of this clearing and of humanism.
This clearing is neither the habitat nor the environment, and this one finds itself in rupture with nature, where it identifies the failure of the human being as a shepherd of the being, whose essence would not be to take care of the sick, but to keep his flock in the clearing, the clearing is the open world and, in this case, the task is used in the being freely chosen and impregnating itself with the being itself.
Before advancing in the criticism, it is necessary to emphasize Sloterdijk’s praise of Heidegger, there is a praise of his criticism of Humanism, reconceptualizing it and seeking the essence of man in this system.
Sloterdijk’s starting point is Heidegger’s critique, where he seeks a better understanding of what man is within this humanism, and a greater understanding of the clearing.
Subjectivity is no longer a mere grammatical fundamental and becomes a foundation as a human representation, whether of its feelings or its essence, and of man in this system.
Sloterdijk’s starting point is Heidegger’s critique, where he seeks a better understanding of what man is within this humanism, and a greater understanding of the clearing.
Subjectivity is no longer a mere grammatical fundamental and becomes a foundation as a human representation, whether of its feelings or its essence, and thus the foundation becomes the self, thus modernity opens an object-subject relationship.
Everything, then, is for man, it is anthropocentric and the world opens up to domination, for science and technique to dominate it, grounding all knowledge, but what is the knowledge about Being.
By exchanging this vocabulary from humanism to his own (subjectivity) Heidegger states, according to Sloterdijk, that the school of domestication of man, which is really a school, the pedagogical project initiated by the Romans, is a failed school, domestication was not possible.
Two of Sloterdijk’s successes are an astonishment for the future of civilization, first a positive necessity that is co-immunity, the idea that only a joint defense of the Being overcomes the self, the other dangerous is that the domestication project has failed and the clearing is an imperative, not just a humanist narrative.
Sloterdijk says textually: “the history of the clearing cannot be developed only as a narrative of the arrival of human beings to the houses of languages” and from there he elaborates his anthropotechnics, will be our next topic.
SLOTERDIJK, P. (2000) Regras para o parque humano. (in portuguese) Trad. José Oscar de Almeida Marques, Brazil, São Paulo: Estação Liberdade.
Spirituality and Asceticism
26
May
Not coincidentally, Peter Sloterdijk apprehends modernity
as a form of secularization and collectivization of the life of the exercise, displacing the asceticism transmitted since antiquity from their respective spiritual contexts and dissolving them in the frothy fluid of the current biopolitical (or psycopolytics) communities dedicated to the training and entrepreneurship of the subjectivity.
It is not by chance that a current philosopher sees modernity as a way of secularizing and collecting exercise life, displacing the asceticism transmitted from antiquity, in different cultures, to the current contexts is dedicated to training and marketing from the daily practice of exercises through memes, rhetoric and a collective training of ideas (of the idealism).
Based on his ascetology, it is possible to perceive how education from childhood to adults is in a historical chain of training through selective immunological and anthropotechnical procedures, which announced by Sloterdijk a long time ago became wide open with the Pandemic, aimed at ripping the subject out. of your community.
In this way, “state athletes” or “domestic companies” are created in the direction of these exercises, what he calls spherological drama, and where childhood has to pay a price for the absence of protesting layers, that is, when the magic circles, the soap bubbles blown by the children’s ecstatic eyes, what he (Sloterdijk) writes in the Sphere I: Bubbles.
This kind of asceticism has nothing of spirituality or a true ascension (where the ascetic root comes from) so soap bubbles are the metaphor of this ephemeral universe, whose exercise reinforces habitus, but does not build a true spiritual asceticism.
The author does not develop it, he only denounces it as a de-spiritualized asceticism, as he himself does not believe in a higher reality, of true ascension, as described in Byung Chul Han’s book in his “Society of Bournot”, where he sees the active life and the contemplative life as two poles of Being, and he turns to the monk St. Gregory.
His term spirituality comes from Foucault’s analysis of the radical forms of dominant governments of “childhood government” which he interposes: “interposes between experience and the language that constitutes history and forms the spirit”, it is thus only a subjectivity.
Byung Chul Han, probably due to his oriental influence, takes another path of an effective contemplative life, which is more clearly expressed in his work: “The branch of time” ( ), where he states: “The greatest happiness comes from contemplative lingering in beauty, formerly called theoria. Its temporal meaning is duration. It concerns itself with eternal and immutable things, which rest in themselves. Neither virtue nor wisdom, only contemplative surrender to truth brings man closer to the gods” (HAN , 2016).
In Chul Han’s work it is possible to understand a spiritualized asceticism in a divine ascension.
HAN, B.-C. (2016) The scent of time. A philosophical essay on the art of delay (in portuguese, Lisbon: ed. Relógio d´água).
Asceticism and Exercises
25
May
The most prominent German philosopher of our time, Peter
Sloterdijk in his work: “You have to change your life” has a brilliant and original insight, it is not the mode of production or even the culture that produces life, but the exercises, for they perform our “ascesis”.
What an exercise means for him, he says in his work: “As an exercise I define any operation that preserves or improves the actor’s qualification to perform the same operation the next time, whether declared as an exercise or not” (Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 14).
He will develop more often the concept of “habitus” that takes up the medieval concept of Aquinas and ancien (hexis) of Aristotle, and from there his anthropological concept:
“[…] they describe an apparently mechanical process under the aspects of inertia and overcoming to explain the incarnation of the spiritual. They identify man as that animal that can do what he must, if anyone has cared in time for his abilities. At the same time, they perceive how the provisions reached continue to grow towards new overcomings” (Idem, p. 289).
And so his theory of habitus points to any custom or ability in the direction of overcoming its current state, from the perspective of a vertical tension it is possible to formulate an art tension of the Good, because even what is already good can be improved, so it begins for this asceticism to elaborate its main concept: the anthropo-technique, written here on purpose with a hyphen.
In Sloterdijk’s interpretation there is a rupture, which he calls secession, between those who leave to choose a life of exercise and the everyday world, which resembles a river in which there are unquestioned accommodations, and for him this is beyond the religious spectrum, culture is merged.
He calls the internal process of this asceticism endorhetoric, which consists of prayers, ritual recitations, monologues and other silent speeches, usually practiced repeatedly, reaching true internal dialogues (they are not hallucinations), but are solitary practices without the Other.
“All exercises, whether of a yoga, athletic, philosophical or musical nature, can only take place if supported by endorhetorical processes, in which acts of self-exhortation, self-examination and self-assessment, under the criteria of the specific school tradition and under continuous appointment in the direction of masters who have already reached the goal, have a decisive role” (Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 369).
There is a going beyond normality and asceticism that leads to another ascension, the encounter with Being.
Sloterdijk, P. (2009) Du musst Dein Leben ändern. Über Antropotechnik Frankfurt, Suhrkamp. (You have to change your life, Portuguese edition 2018, ed. Relógio d´água)
Serenity, originality and peace
19
May
Serenity refers to the idea of a super quality of Being, it comes
from the Latin serenus, which is different from patience which comes from patientia, “resistance and submission” and is rather confused with serene.
Three qualities of the Self can be directly linked to serenity: peaceful, which means solving problems with peace, calm, which means keeping your inner peace at peace, and clear, which means expressing and communicating peace with clarity.
Heideger wrote a booklet on Serenity, at the initial chapter end it with a sentence that expresses in philosophy a synthesis of serenity: “when serenity towards things and openness to mystery awaken in us, we should reach a path that leads to a new ground. On this soil the creation of immortal works could put down new roots” (Heidegger, 1959, p. 27).
We are lacking in the conception of Being and that Heidegger highlights in his idea about the originary the idea of Region, as it was translated from German, but a nation could be the locus of belonging as Being in its true originary identity, Heidegger wrote:
“We are not and never are outside the Region, since as thinking beings […] we remain on the horizon […] The horizon is, however, the side of the Region facing our power of representation (Vor -stellen). The region surrounds us and shows itself to us as a horizon” (HEIDEGGER, 1959, p. 48).
Here it is necessary to return to a dilemma in Heidegger’s thinking, considering that being in the midst of the Region is to remain on the horizon: to be, but not to be, on this original path, means that it is a revelation of the Region, which becomes visible to the being, in it his Being is.
The philosopher states that serenity presupposes being free (Gelassensein) and the Region itself (Ge-eignet) and entrusts to the serene entity (gelassen) the guard of serenity. Now, if waiting is fundamental and decisive, what we are talking about is the appropriation to which “we belong to what we wait for” (Heidegger, 1959, p. 50)
The author does not ignore the absence of this concept in the West, a historical lack of knowledge: “the essence of thought cannot be determined from thought, that is, from waiting as such, but from the other of oneself (Anderer seiner selbst), that is, from the Region, which is insofar as it is religionalized” (Heidegger, 1959, P. 51).
This is where contemporary wars are based, without forgetting that many of them had their origin in the dispute over the territories of native peoples where their Being was completely ignored.
HEIDEGGER, M. (1959) Serenidade (Serenity). Lisboa: Instituto Piaget.
Different reactions to dominant thinking
03
Feb
In countries that were colonies of Europe, the term decolonization
emerged, which differs from decolonization because it penetrates precisely into the dominant thought and epistemology (some authors will call it epistemicide), which is not the simple liberation of domination, but also the resurgence of cultures. subalterns.
Thus, authors appeared in Africa (such as Achiles Mbembe), in Latin America (Aníbal Quijano and Rendón Rojas y Morán Reyes), as well as authors of original culture such as indigenous peoples (Davi Kopenawa and Airton Krenak), but a dialogue with European authors is possible. open to this perspective like Peter Sloterdijk (speaks of Europe as the Empire of the Center) and Boaventura Santos (speaks of epistemicide and also some concepts of decolonization), there are many others of course.
Christian culture must also be highlighted in these cultures, seen by many authors as a collaborator of colonialism, one cannot deny the historical perspective and also the doctrine that is the liberation of peoples and a culture of fraternity and solidarity, it is also a minority today in Europe and persecuted in many cases.
Among the Europeans who defend a new humanism, or a humanism in fact, since the Enlightenment and materialist theories failed to contemplate the human soul as a whole, and are therefore a one-legged humanism, among the Europeans I highlight Peter Sloterdijk and Edgar Morin, the first who defends the concept of community as a “protective shield” capable of saving our species, and the second, a planetary humanism, where man is a citizen of the world and diversities are respected.
Both consider the proposals populist, it is good to know that there are left and right, they must lose with the current crisis and global consumerism depends on an atmosphere of “frivolity” or superficiality that humanity will be forced to rethink, we will not go back to that what we consider stable, the original writers themselves, as Davi Krenak highlights in several interviews, what we want to return to was not good, there was no real happiness and well-being in what was considered normal.
As an aspect of the construction of thought, in Sloterdijk I highlight anthropotechnics, for him modernity was a de-verticalization of existence and a de-spiritualization of asceticism, while the knowledge and wisdom proposed in antiquity leave the empirical and the deceptive to go towards the eternal and of the true, as religion does not exist for him, it would be a movement of wisdom and knowledge, and not just an asceticism of exercises, where the immortal soul was exchanged for the body.
In Edgar Morin’s perspective, it is the hologrammatic perspective that can give man a vision of the whole, now fragmented by the specialization and particularity of each branch of science, a paradox of the complex system in which man is a part that must be integrated into the whole, where “not only the part is in the whole, but in which the whole is inscribed in the part”, the pandemic taught us this, but the lesson was still poorly learned, in the middle of the pandemic crisis it was decided that everything is released and there is no protocol for protection of all in each (each part), and there is no co-immunity.
