Arquivo para a ‘Antropotécnica’ Categoria
Sloterdijk’s new book
29
Dec
Peter Sloterdijk’s book “Las epidemias policas” is still in progress, but
there are already quotes and comments about it, which read that there is an “almost perfect synchronicity of the microbial pandemic with the informative one, and believes that the current crisis could lead to“ to a collective conscience within individualism ”, where a new optimism appears.
One of the most widely read comments on the proto-book is what was published on August 26, 2020 in by El Ciudadano, and which was commented on by the Brazilian magazine IHU (Instituto Humanitas Unisinos, do Brazil).
It states that society is not yet “in a position to look beyond the pandemic” and predicts that little will change as “many look forward to returning to the continual frivolity of the consumerist way of life” and only with time and reflection does this “Will lead to a transformation of the collective consciousness within individualism.
The name is because it sees the media as “carriers of infections” and that the current democracy is superficial to house the exchange of argument and dialogue, so we are always “between epidemics, strategies and vaccines” in a broader sense, where the information is just a network of “emotion, poisoning and destruction of public judgment”.
The analysis is accurate because dualism and polarization do not have only one side, but they have both equally and it seems that we are stuck in this logic where arguments matter little.
For example, he points out about hate speech, the fact that “people often tend to see each other as a source of danger is not a consequence of the current coronavirus pandemic, nor is it an invention of nineteenth-century pseudo-biological racism, Claude -Lévy Strauss pointed out, a long time ago that a dose of xenophobia is part of the ancestral heritage of the species homo sapiens ”.
Despite the systems that explained everything having failed, he detects that “now, almost nothing is as contagious as the enthusiasm for universalist ideas. When universalism fails, criticism arises. When criticism fails, mass resentment arises furiously ”and concludes that this is what leads to“ epidemics of anger ”, in short our difficulty in resignation and resilience.
He makes his historical synthesis analyzing that “In Europe, the Enlightenment started with the statement that common sense is the best distributed thing in the world. There are many reasons to doubt the veracity of this thesis”, we now know that security and immunities are poorly distributed.
New intimacy and new world
24
Dec
In intimacy, in our “bubbles” that generate our culture, we
defend and promote our ideas, our values and what we want for a better world.
Christmas somehow still makes men sympathize and think generously about the future world beyond their bubble, their selfishness, and if this goes on for the year a new world may be born, even in a pandemic crisis that is already a broader crisis.
The reflections of Sloterdijk and other thinkers is how interiority has become an isolated world, like a “bubble”, and in it reflects our initial stage of our life in the maternal womb and extends through life, the analysis made by Sloterdijk ( also Bachelard does it in another way, see the post) it is like the biblical passage of the prophet Jonas in front of the whale, which is illustrative of this way of being, of seeking an “intimacy” of comfort.
By remaining in the whale’s womb, symbolically it is what we seek as a region of comfort, or security, in a hostile world where we must seek co-immunity, a defense where everyone can participate and enjoy a well-being.
The birth of Jesus for Christians means the announcement of this womb, of this “kingdom”, in these days we celebrate the coming through a child-God of this new time in a new world.
The biblical passage that reports the birth of Jesus says that Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem, due to the census made by the Roman Empire: “to register with Mary, his wife, who was pregnant. While they were in Bethlehem, the days of childbirth were completed, and Mary gave birth to her firstborn son. She bandaged him and put him in the manger, as there was no place for them in the inn ”(Lk 2,5-7).
Spherelogy, intimacy and exteriority
23
Dec
It is not by chance that Sloterdijk praises Gaston Bachelard
at the beginning of Spheres I, his approach has a deep dialogue with Bachelard’s poetics of space, as both the intimacy theme is linked to articulation and two conceptions: “exteriority” and “space”.
The first point is to understand that the phenomenological approach has a direct influence on Heidegger’s Being and Time, at the same time that they outline criticisms, even though Heidegger did not dwell deeply on the theme, it is between the lines of his work.
In the opening chapter, Sloterdijk refers to the human with the so-called “erratic blocks”, in which the astonishment at the “I” in the world would be like these blocks that “are there”. In view of this, the possibility of consciousness being made with the world opens up.
The recognition of this condition of being played randomly in the world does not happen smoothly, but through “the unexpected, the rebellious and the disturbing that the ecstatic personal finding can be” (SLOTERDIJK, 2008, p. 16), erratic blocks were geological formations displaced in the last ice age.
The first volume is dedicated to the issue of intimacy and Sloterdijk part of the mother-baby relationship, we are joined to another body from the moment of conception, by a “rejected organ” that is the placenta, whereas in other times it was somehow ritualized, now the “original companion” is discarded as garbage.
He will point out from this (as he did with the prophet Jonas) to look for ways not explored by current philosophy, “the relationship, the connection, the fluctuation in an within-something and in a with-something, being contained in between” (SLOTERDIJK, 2016) and for this reason his spherology is his essential work.
I highlight Bachelard’s work because for him there is a perspective that I consider broader, that of describing the intimate experience in addition to the experience with the other, with the totality of the world.
This is also the case in Bachelard, in opposition to Heidegger, where he states: “From our point of view, from the point of view of a phenomenologist who lives from his origins, the conscious metaphysics that is located at the moment when being is ‘thrown into the world’ it is a second position metaphysics.” (BACHELARD, 1993, p. 27)
While Sloterdijk is the womb the primary “space”, the place of well-being, for Bachelard it is the home, the paradigmatic place of well-being and protection.
If we understand interiority as the place where we combine these two sensations: the womb that is the primordial house, and the house that is the space in the world where we co-inhabit with other beings, not just humans, of course, we can combine interiority and intimacy, and we have a new horizon not only metaphysical, but human, divine and between these two conjugations: the original womb, the common home and the final destination that interiority provides.
BACHELARD, G. (1994) A poética do espaço. Trad. Antônio de Pádua Danesi. Bransil. São Paulo: Martins Fontes.
SLOTERDIJK, P. (2008) O Estranhamento do Mundo. Trad Ana Nolasco. Lisboa: Relógio d’Água, 2008
SLOTERDIJK, P. (2016) Esferas I: bolhas. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade.
Spherology and Jonah
22
Dec
The resumption of the prophet Jonas within Peter Sloterdijk’s 
spherology, owes to the concept of intimacy that explores it as well as we conceived it, a personal, safe and stronghold composed of a single particular material, this specific intimacy must not exist, he will use two expressions “dyad” and“ divalence ”, then you will combine them with a two-tone musical expression, where there is no dominant note.
It seems that the Jewish sense of Jonas, the one who rejected his mission and went to the whale’s belly would have little to do with this, only with the intimacy, with the stronghold where he fell refusing his “mission”, but thought like a dyad, the a relationship of two or more where there is no center, and divalence, unlike ambivalence where they are equal, there are opposing forces in a dyadic relationship.
Not only in human phenomena, but every type of relationship has dyadic forces, intrapersonal relationships would also be this tangle of consciousness between the internal, the external, the personal, the collective, or if we prefer the idealistic, the subjective and the inter-subjective relationships.
Let us now return to the topic to think about Jonah, the prophet and the whale.
Being a prophet means revealing the will of God to his people, so the dyad between the divine and the human is said between the man / saint, as a man would not be able to handle his task, after all it was necessary to have holiness and inhabit the divine, but neither only a saint would be enough, because it is necessary to be a man to know the perdition and occupy the land, in the case of Jonah preaching conversion to the people of Nineveh, the Assyrians were terrible.
Here the whale comes in, recognizing the power of his God in it, prays, repents and is “vomited” on solid ground, leaving near the city that he should prophesy before his disobedience, but when he is vomited he returns to fulfill God’s will and his role as a prophet.
Here come the double notes, the triumphant ending, it is neither the structure of man nor the prophet that wins, it is a place of man / prophet, the relational structure is already there, right in front of us if we want to dissect it , will fulfill the mission, even if you do not want it.
For Christians it is the importance of the mission, but for Sloterdijk it is even more transcendent (even if it doesn’t have the slightest religious tic), it is to answer their essential ballpoint question: where we are when we are in the world, Jonah is fundamental for this, in the womb of the whale afraid of our fate, so we need to be vomited to understand our tasks.
The philosopher ironically says: “the only bodies that are located without duality in the world are those of the dead” (Spheres I), and asks the reader and me: Where are you now? The answer to this is not a simple GPS, but your conscience is the only tool you have available to understand your surroundings and articulate a more sensible answer that says something about being there.
Noogenesis: matris in gremio
18
Dec
In tour 10 of Spheres I, Peter Sloterdijk makes a connection 
between the conception of Mary (the name Concept comes from conception) and tragedy, and a text that is certainly known to the philosopher is Hörderlin’s interpretation of the Greek tragedy Oedipus King of Sophocles, where he uses the term aorgic for the search for Epic to know who he is, the more he searches, the less conscious consciousness becomes towards tragedy.
The tragedy is that father Laio, had heard from the oracle of Delphi, that his son would kill him and marry his mother Jocasta, the king hands him over to a poor shepherd to kill him, but the shepherd raises him and then he goes stop at the hands of Polybius, king of Corinth who raised him as a son, but the tragedy is fulfilled and then Oedipus kills King Laius, who was his real father and marries Jocasta when he becomes aware of the blind truth, the tragedy has more details, here it is just to understand the aorgic.
Sloterdijk inverts this story to talk about Christian mariology, in his tour 10 Matris in gremio (mother’s lap or lap), where after analyzing the text De humanitae conditionis in miseria by Lotário de Segni (1160-1216) that would become Pope Inocencio III, who says that the liquid that would feed the child is the same as the menstruation that would be interrupted with the pregnancy.
Sloterdijk, states that “there is no doubt that Jesus, even in gremio, must have been provided with a different dietary plan” (Sloterdijk, 2016, p. 557), and will use Question 31 from the third book of the Summa Theological of Thomas de Aquino, however the important thing is his “conception”.
Tomás de Aquino’s quote is important because it explains the noogenesis:
“… Because, by the action of the Holy Spirit, this blood is collected from the Virgin’s lap and formed into a fetus. That is why it is said that the body of Christ was formed by the most chaste and pure blood of the virgin ”(Aquino, Suma Theológica III, 31, 5, 3, SP: Loyola, 2001-2002).
In the biblical text, Mary, although promised to Joseph, he has not yet married her, says the biblical text: “Mary asked the angel,” How will this happen if I don’t know any man? ” (Lk 1,34), and receives the answer that will be by the action of the spirit, under the shadow of the power of the Most High.
And so the idea was born that Mary was taken to heaven, but it is also the birth 11 centuries before being accepted, the dogma of her Immaculate Conception (which by popular use became Conceição), thus “it is the very matrix of God who miraculously offered the sculptor the material of his sculpture, and to God the material to become a man… ”(Damasceno apud Sloterdijk, 2016, p. 558), which thus pre-announces Mary’s aortic action with Jesus and God- Father, as a pericoresis in extremis (in the photo, also used by Sloterdijk, Virgin with Overture, late 14th century, Cluny Museum in Paris), also cited by Sloterdijk.
Sloterdijk, P. (2016) Esferas I, trad. José Oscar de Almeida Marques, BR-São Paulo: Estação Memória editors.
Two hearts and a new relationship
17
Dec
Peter Sloterdijk’s wit penetrates the post-reform Catholic 
mystique, “particularly under the mystical influence of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Marguerite Marie Alacoque (1647-1690). a vast cult movement, which also ended up imposing liturgical concessions and doctrinal formulations ”(p. 115).
It will highlight the work of the oratorian priest and popular missionary João Eudes (1601-1980) “born in Normandy, who entered the Catholic annals as the founder of a cult of great liturgical strength, the cult of two hearts” (p. 116), the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Contrary to many interpretations, this atheist philosopher, in addition to maintaining the topicality of the topic, since the foundation of this type of mystique, is “a struggle against outside, non-Catholic life, separated from something that is not within God” ( page 116).
According to Eudes, the life of the saints was sustained in a “continuous suspension of the amniotic bag of the Absolute” (the quote is from Sloterdijk), but the important thing is to highlight the typical engagement of Mary, which consists according to the philosopher “in the fact that she created a heaven bipolar heart, in which the Son’s heart could merge into a mystical union with the mother’s heart ”(p. 116), something with the theme of the previous post, but in much higher quality.
After the atheistic manifestation of the “bipolar”, it can be said that these hearts in a deep relationship is not an ancient spirituality, something of ladies who wear a red ribbon on festive days of the Apostolate of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, but what the priest Eudes elaborated in the post-reform period and what the philosopher calls “the canopy of the double heart of the Son and the Mother … an intercordial family, metaphysically enlarged” (idem, p. 116).
This relationship of these hearts, interpreted in the heart of nature, burning in collaboration that touches the radiant heart of love from the upper world in the work of Jacob Böhme (Theosophical Works, 1682), in the photo illustrated on page 117 of the book, the broader relationship appears in the final pages on tour 10 “Matris no grêmio” (on her mother’s lap), detailed as a “marylogical whim”.
The idea of the child in Mary’s womb takes on a divine figure (of the Father God), what the Orthodox and Catholics call Teotokos (mother of God) (in the photo the icon of G. Gashev) that for evangelicals is heresy, but what do they mean for this moment of pandemic crisis, and of a previous civilization crisis?
SLOTERDIJK, P. (2016) Esferas I, trad. José Oscar de Almeida Marques, Brazil/São Paulo: Estação Memória.
Excess or Eucharistic
16
Dec
Access In Spheres I, the author Peter Sloterdijk will suddenly
reveal when he is talking about “thinking the inner space”, that his initial inspiration is due to Gaston Bachelard “who, with his phenomenology of material imagination and, especially for his studies of psychoanalysis of the elements, brought us a treasure trove of luminous insights to which it is always necessary to return ”(page 91).
It makes a surprising revelation, I reaffirm its keen religious sense even though it states the opposite, stating that due to Bachelard “every man, by the simple fact of looking inward, becomes a Jonah or, more exactly, a whale and a prophet together in one person” (page 91), and indicates that he will follow these indispensable intuitions.
Such is the end of this introduction where it states: “the fundamental risk of all intimacy … destroyer comes closer to us than the ally” (p. 92) but if it were the other way around. It connects the cardiac issue to the eucharistic excess, it will explore the idea of the heart by initially linking it to two Japanese expressions that have more complete cosmogonies: kokoro (heart, soul, spirit, sense) and hara (belly and center of the body), citing the work of Guido Rappe.
Then the Western culture returns, taking the writing Herzmaere from the poet Conrado de Wüzburg that was produced in the 1260s, and the account of confessor Raimundo de Padua of Catarina de Siena, who is in Vida dos Santos, where a mysterious exchange of the mystical took place with the heart of Christ (above painting by Giovanni di Paolo), he will also comment later on the writing De amore by Marcílio Ficino on Plato’s Banquet from 1649.
The medieval tale of Würzburg is the recurring exchange of hearts, the author mentions only in the Decameron there are two passages, but it is in the analysis of Catarina de Siena that there are vital points.
He will say that it is not possible for the human to level himself with the divine except for its absolute annulment, and this is “the situation of mystical exception, however, the metaphysical cleavage between the poles is leveled out.” (page 103). It will state that it is “pure subjectivity reaches the hot zone of the subject being totally dematerialized, not represented” (page 103), follows the reasoning until saying that it is “hysteria”.
For the philosopher, the mystic’s desire was, from the beginning, not so much to welcome “the Other in itself as to plunge herself into the aura of the Other” (page 106), here I transform excess into access, for Christianity there is no excess, and it’s there the divine to submit to being “devoured” in the Eucharist by the creature, and thus give him access to the inaccessible: the transubstantiated divine, in an anti-aortic reaction.
His saga penetrates even more in the Christian mystique, especially the Catholic one, when speaking of the wounds of San Francisco, the exhumation of the body of Felipe Neri, that would have found a hand-wide flaw, and this when having access (or excess as the author wants) the Eucharist: “when receiving the host, edema of the mouth and cheeks that gave the impression that he was gagged.” (page 115).
This reading is important in the Christmas period, because the author himself affirms that since the beginning the church has been embarrassed “in the face of the embarrassment of having to correctly determine the proportion in which the entry of God into the realm of human beings” (page 126 ) because this is exactly an excess (as the author wants) that gives access (who does not believe).
Sloterdijk spheres
15
Dec
Volumes I, II and III of the Spheres of Peter Sloterdijk are digressions
on the human spheres that include thought, culture and religion (although he says no to consider he wrote Post-God and makes several allusions to religious issues, such as “matris in grêmio ”and “eucharistic excess ”).
What Spheres in fact is for the author of anthropotechnical studies, can be read as: “life is a matter of form, this is the thesis that we associate with the venerable expression” sphere “, of philosophers and geometers.” (Sloterdijk, p. 14)
However, these “spheres” go beyond form, it is a metaphysical form, which in its representation serves as the moonlight for the protection of humanity, which is placed in bubbles of stones, weapons, poetry and ideas, but it lacks immunity, written before pandemic, launched co-immunity.
His spherology intends to answer, in addition to Heidegger’s dasein, being-there-in-the-world, as what we mean when we say we are in the world from the reception in the mother’s arms after the expulsion from the uterus, until the construction of civilization after the expulsion of Eden, of course is a metaphor.
With the death (or night of God for religious), the great protective sphere of humanist civilization lost its local character and extended to the infinite, the protective relationships of the intimate were dissolved in formal gray relationships, so now it is what happens in this absolute exteriority?
It is necessary to speculate then on how to survive and protect oneself, an animal in need that no longer has a habitat to venture into the eccentricity of ex-sistens (being out), it is also the question of address, inhabiting a community of care, this is the co -immunity.
Even before the pandemic, Sloterdijk’s reasoning revealed what it is to care and co-exist, without these concepts the pandemic will pass and we will return to frivolity, as the thinker says.
Sloterdijk, P. (2016) Esferas I, trad. José Oscar de Almeida Marques, BR-São Paulo: Estação Memória editors.
The crisis of Nature and aorgic transform
10
Dec
The apparent death of thought was developed by 
Peter Sloterdijk, it is also in his other writings If Europe awakened, The critique of cynical reason and the 3 volumes of the Spheres, however a root pointed out there is not fully developed the relationship with nature, its “Aorgic”.
Rousseau had already debated with the atheistic Illuminists saying that what is most insulting “is not thinking (the Divinity) but thinking wrong about it”, he elaborated his famous speech on the profession of faith of the Savoyard vicar in which he expresses their religious conceptions.
However, the important thing is his thought about nature “a will moves the universe and animates nature”, since Aristotle’s relationship with man is to see her as submissive to the human will such is the anthropocentric paradox, because Nature is beyond and it precedes man, who is part of it and not its absolute master, although as Teilhard Chardin says it is its maximum complexity.
This complexity of nature is developed by Edgar Morin, in his Method I which is the Nature of Nature, but the place of man in nature (the title of one of Chardin’s books) is still incognito and we now know that if we do not obey it, it perishes and we also as a consequence, that is why anthropocentrism is a paradox, we are codependents and co-participants of Nature, and it shows signs of agony, also the skeptic Harari sees this, and many experts.
What will be the reaction of nature, it could happen due to a strong event that changes the whole planet, the so-called aortic reaction, the inorganic over the organic, the earth would totally change and some mystics created an image of this new earth (above), which I call of “newgea”, in reference to the great mutation of the earth by successive earthquakes in pangea, there would be a chain reaction.
We must remember Energy sources such as nuclear plants, the tsunami followed by the tsunami in Japan (march 2011) showed that nuclear plants are a problem, deactivating them is not possible.
Harari, speaking of Homo Deus, his second successful book, believes that man would do this, religious (some of course), mystics and visionaries know that an aorgic event can occur.
Apparent death of thought
09
Dec
If there is a sphere beyond pure anthropology and Darwinian 
scientism, it is not only in religious thought, but also in thought that goes beyond human, this thought, although in crisis, is present in contemporary philosophy.
Peter Sloterdijk wrote The apparent death of thinking: about philosophy and science as a life of exercises, his general theme about contemporary society as “a life of exercises”. The book is the result of several lectures given in 2009 called “unseld” lectures, at the Scientiarum Forum of the University of the Tübingen whose theme was “Anthropology in the discussions of science”, and the author proposes two forms of anthropotechnics, the short-range (You have to change your route) and a long-range one called Selbstverbesserung (yes enhancement).
There is a reinterpretation of Kant and Cassirer due to an ontological excess, which compensates for the “biological deficit”, I explain better, the being who seeks to transcend a deficient biological reality, in such a way that his general “exercise of life” new problems, philosophical and scientific theories. Seeing that the exposition and practices in the usual history of ideas made possible the existence of an improbable science and philosophy, he elaborates a genealogy of the “homo theoretician”, the “pure observer”.
I t analyzes the conditions that arise in the West, the theoretical attitude in general, and science in particular, where he sees what he will call “the murder of an apparent dead” (p. 14), will expand the Husserlian notion of epoché, put in brackets all exteriority and judgment, and expands this concept.
The proposed genealogical method capable of re-elaborating the origin of the product of the sciences, implies what Nietzsche adopted as an attitude of suspicion: “Does the theoretical homo really come from a cradle as high as it is guaranteed from the first days? Or is it better a bastard who wants to impress with fake titles? “(p.57), the provocation has an earlier path already taken.
Ira e Tempo (2006) (Wrath and Time), refers to the product of failure in the space of the polis), psychological (for a psychic disposition to distance oneself from the environment), sociological (through a pedagogy of training the individual) and half-theoretical (the result of a written culture that predisposes the distance of a text, which in turn keeps the distance of the time of life.
This whole framework and to say that we are facing extremely difficult dilemmas for man, for thought and for the civilizing process itself, is beyond and below the pandemic, the outbreak of the real in Marx and the neo-Hegelians, Nietzschean perspectivism, consciousness class in Lukács, Heidegger’s trajectory, the ethical revolution in the natural sciences after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the existentialist commitment, knowledge in Scheler, Kuhn and Foucault, the demystification of isolation in scientific research by Latour and CTS (Science, technology and Society) (pp. 121-129).
Sloterdijk, Peter (2013). Muerte aparente en el pensar. Sobre la filosofía y la ciencia como ejercicio. Siruela. Barcelona.
