Arquivo para a ‘Antropotécnica’ Categoria
Jonah and the resistance of the spirit
21
Feb
As we approach great tragedies, the Biblical allegory
of Jonah is interesting to remember, even the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk highlights it, even if he is not a Christian, it is good to remember that Jonah is also in the Quran and is an important character for Judaism.
The curious biblical passage in which Jonah was supposed to evangelize the city of Nineveh so that it would not perish, one of the greatest of his time, is believed that out of fear of the Assyrians, known for their cruelty, Jonah tried to flee on a ship to Tarshish, who suffered a strong storm, they discover that the reason is Jonah who is thrown into the sea.
At sea, Jonah would have spent three days and 3 nights in the belly of a whale and would then be thrown into the city of Nineveh to return to his mission. There he preached and Nineveh was converted.
Sloterdijk does not use the terms dualism or polarization, he uses it even before the current global polarization that causes bloody wars and great controversies, the philosopher uses the terms dyad, a relationship between two or more different people in which there is no center but rather polycentrism.
This is basic to understanding who Jonah is for the German philosopher, he sees him as a prophet and worshiper of the God of the Jews, whose duty is to establish the relationship between the divine and the human, and that for humans to inhabit the divine they need to know and reject the human losses in the world.
Sloterdijk’s central question in Spheres I – the bubbles, is where are we when we are in the world? And in the German language there is a specific word for being in the world and being WITH the world, the word is “vorhandensein”, which means “being-in-the-world”, which although it means something else for Heideggeer that would just be “dasein”, it takes on greater meaning.
For Sloterdijk the only bodies that are outside this dyad or this polycentrism “the only bodies that are located without duality in the world are those of the dead” (Spheres I), that is, every time you find yourself in a place you are there and with him, you see him and recognize him.
Where was Jonah when he was in the world? Inside the whale. The whale is part of Jonas’ consciousness that provokes him to think about the outside from the inside. Heidegger had already thought about this pure interior of which we are all victims, a radical and intrinsic space, our unique and first dwelling through which all our impressions, thoughts and affections permeate.
The relationship with the outside is then one of “tension”, it is not only a filter of the outside, but it is also a lens to understand everything, even the inside itself, so being on the “whale” was preparation for Jonas to face it, see that beforehand there is a storm on the ship that is “in the world” and it is thrown overboard.
Our inner path must “help”, illuminate and make us aware of what we are “in the world” and be something else like the world when we have this light.
Sloterdijk, P. Bubbles: Spheres I: Microspherology. Translated by José Oscar de Almeida Marques. Brazil, Sáo Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2016. (em english: Transl. Wieland Hoban, 2011).
The clearing and the truth
20
Feb
The concept of truth in Greek philosophy does
not arise from logic, mathematics or physics, the allegory of the Cave in Plato, where those in the cave see only the shadows and not the truth as it is, in Heidegger’s interpretation, he will demonstrate that forgetting the true Being of things produced by modern thought (Kant and Descartes) is nothing more than the necessary result of a metaphysical way of thinking.
This metaphysics underwent a change in determining the essence of the concept of truth: in this passage there was a transformation from the notion of truth as unveiling to the notion of truth as correction or correspondence of thought as the thing.
This interpretation begins by correcting the Greek word eidos and idea (Idea) by “aspect”, this aspect of an entity is not its mere appearance as perceived immediately by the senses, it is what the entity shows itself through what it presents itself.
It is in this self-showing of its aspect that the entity appears and can be captured by the intellect (Heidegger, 2007, p. 3), just as the eye sees sensitive objects in their external appearance thanks to sunlight, man “sees ” being in the light of ideas, thus Ideas illuminate the being of beings, make their essence visible (in Heidegger’s terminology: the entitative of beings), and allow the soul to contemplate it.
As Heidegger (2007, p. 6) states: “The aspects of which the things themselves are, that is, the eidee (the ideas in the Greek sense), constitute the essence in whose light every particular being, this or that, shows itself in whose showing itself what appears becomes newly uncovered and accessible”.
Heidegger states in a passage from Being and Time that the traditional conception of truth (this one from Kant and Descartes) is based on the premise that the essence of truth resides in the agreement of the judgment with the object (adequatio intellectos et rei) a correspondence (or omoiosis) without explaining what the notion of correspondence is.
The ontological proposition of showing what and discovering what it is (Heidegger, 2005, p. 288) is thus something that “discovers the being in itself, proposes, shows, allows us to see (apofánsis) the being in its discovered state” , reveals the being in itself, but the Being was forgotten.
As Heidegger states: “The true being of logos as apophasis is the aletheien”. Aletheia, the unveiling, therefore, is “the foundation of the original phenomenon of truth” (Heidegger, 2005, p. 288).
HEIDEGGER, M. (2005) Being and Time. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes, 2005. (in portuguese)
HEIDEGGER, M. (2007) Platón’s doctrine concerning truth. Eikasia, Revista de Filosofía, v. 12, Extraordinary I. (in Spanish).
True asceticism
13
Feb
There are no clear definitions, neither in
psychology, nor in sociology or morals, of what constitutes true balanced joy, or it deviates towards euphoria which involves maintaining joy at high levels, which is not possible all the time, or its compensation, which is to decrease to nostalgic and low levels that cannot be more than contentment.
Also in philosophy he spoke about joy and euphoria, derived from the Greek (euphoria) which means to easily sustain what is carried (phoros), but the term appears in modern terms in 1875 to refer to the contentment experienced by morphine addicts, being also characteristic of what is called bipolar disorder.
Everything depends on the desire for human elevation to a stage where being higher is sustainable (charged – self + phoros), so an ascent, an ascesis, can be assumed.
Peter Sloterdijk conceptualized current society as having a despiritualized asceticism, of course its spirituality does not refer to a cult or defined belief, but he questions that this climb today is without spiritual support, without a true asceticism.
The metaphor that Sloterdijk uses of the spheres, once again with explicit allusions to Heidegger, referring to the constructions of the intimate and immunological spheres, is that of the house (Haus or Gehäuse), it is not only a place that offers protection, but also constitutes a psychic, spiritual and intellectual sphere for this “ascesis”.
There is no climb without effort, and often without sacrifices, and there is no climb if it is not going to the top, so asceticism is not an exercise or training, but a practical life of ascending.
Therefore, joy without effort for life, for daily bread, for human and not just material progress is false asceticism, it has no support, it collapses after “exercise” and if it can be compared to climbing a mountain, you must remember to support it at the top when descending.
Speeches, apotheoses and vertigo are almost endless pursuits these days, catchphrases do not produce life, they do not give people joy and lasting peace, possession of false wisdom, false joy and elevation, because they collapse the next day in the face of reality.
Promises of earthly paradise, enrichment and consumer goods are nothing more than euphoria, false asceticism, the possession of a good does not necessarily mean happiness and inner peace, which all men desire, even more so these days, a little bit of lasting peace and joy is only possible with true asceticism, without giving up the goods of life and mutual respect.
Joy will pass and an Ash Wednesday will come and then let us face the difficulties with courage and determination, a true ascetic knows every step they must take.
Idealism and real experience
18
Jan
The great discovery of real life (or rediscovery if
we take classical and medieval ontology as a basis) is a radical critique of idealism, which separates the subject of life from the real world, what is promised in life projected onto things and not things (our posts from last week) is the real-life catastrophe that does not translate into real and concrete values.
Phenomenology returns to real life through the Lebenswelt (world of life) that was taken up by the philosopher Husserl and that is touched upon and cited by Habermas, without really developing it.
The objective of this philosophy is to show that the human being must be the center of the knowledge process, human consciousness is a giver of meaning to the world of things, or the phenomena of this world, from which the name phenomenology comes, non-things can also reacquire meaning if we penetrate this human reason (which idealism calls subjectivity).
With this, human consciousness reacquires meaning and meaning to phenomena and things in the world, directing them to what each thing is in essence, in a path that is always intentional and thus gives meaning.
Husserl in his work “Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology”, is where this concept appears in a clear and in-depth way, because it establishes a relationship between epistemology (the systematization of knowledge) and philosophy and rediscovers asceticism.
Thus, a true asceticism does not separate the world of things and non-things, just showing that there would be an unreality in one of these worlds, as it is not separated from life, it is there that we verify that we move from the concrete world of life to a path whose evolution destroys the basis of the human and the real, wars and personal declines are this.
In Habermas the world of life is treated as something that is immediately available to social actors in the form of meaning and/or representations available to everyone, whereas for Husserl the phenomenological foundation refers to an ethics for the science and technique of the world, given that science has not managed to reach this level as a discourse on action in which the life of reflection is absent, and within science, which is what Kant’s criticism does.
Sloterdijk developed something close to this concept as a despiritualized asceticism, that is, despite working on the concept of “phenomenology of the spirit” they remain in the abstract field and their real updating in the world of life does not happen, because it is not clear what type of exercise this is.
So we carry out a series of “exercises”, we are the society of physical and mental exercises, but their translation into the world of life does not lead to concrete social and moral acts.
Husserl, Edmund. (1986). La crise des sciences européennes et la phénomènologie transcendentale. Trad. De Gerard Granel. Paris: Edittrice CLUEB.
Non-things and subjectivity, the distorted eidos
12
Jan
Subjectivity comes from idealism that judges Being
separate from things, thus only being if projected onto objects, but the Greek “eidos”, from which nascent idealism came, there was no such separation, both in Aristotle’s 4 causes: material, formal, efficient and final, as well as in the theory of Platonic ideas, which is the essence and which we have already related to the thing.
Those who think the world is immersed in eroticization are mistaken, be it the world of fantasy, that which comes from works of fiction, from children’s imagination and from looking with hope at a better future, today in an increasingly worrying present, Chul- Han writes like this:
“Without fantasy, there is only pornography. Today, the perception itself has pornographic features. It occurs as an immediate contact, even as a copulation of image and eye. The erotic occurs in the blink of an eye” (Han, 2022), that is, it is precisely its opposite, we are in the existential void, in the denial of Being and in it only pornography remains, as a degradation of Being.
Quoting Barthes, Hul-Han clarifies the part of the piece that is: “Absolute subjectivity can only be achieved in a state of silence, the effort to achieve silence (closing the eyes means making the image speak in the silence). Photography touches me when I remove it from its usual blahblablah […] not say anything, close my eyes […]” (Han, 2022) and he is quoting Roland Barthes in his work (photo): The camera lucida (or Lucid, depending on the translation).
Photography is therefore a way of perpetuating silence, the desire of many to take photos as an individual act is to remove it from everyday life and insert something that is eternal, while the public exposure that the digital universe has allowed is to return it to the “ usual blahblabla”, says the author: “The disaster of digital communication arises from the fact that we don’t have time to close our eyes” and maybe he doesn’t know but this is even physical, by not blinking our eyes we should use eye lubricants if We expose it for a lot of time on screens.
“Noise is both acoustic pollution and visual pollution. It pollutes attention” (Han, 2022) and citing Michel Serres says that this instinct is of animal origin, as dogs, tigers and other animals that urinate to demarcate land, pollute with their stench to inhibit other animals from approaching.
Allowing others to approach is not demarcating territory. Jesus’ biblical response to the initial contact of two new disciples is wise (John 1:38): “Jesus asked: “What are you looking for?” They said, “Rabbi (which means: Master), where do you live?” and he replied: “Come and see” and they went and stayed with Him, because he did not demarcate ground and did not close himself.
The logic of silence is contrary to noise, which does not just mean the pollution of an audible sound, but a complete void capable of containing and receiving the Other.
Han, Byung-Chul (2022) Não-coisas : reviravoltas do mundo da vida , transl. of the Rafael Rodrigues Garcia. Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: ed. Vozes.
The non-thing and the amoral world
11
Jan
For Byung Chul-Han, what is changing is the
world of merchandise with the digital, he will analyze the power of the book and the ebook, the latter as a non-thing, the smartphone and other digital objects, but the world of morals as well is changing, he quotes in passing:
“A person uninterested in things, in possessions, does not submit to the “morality of things” based on work and property. She wants to play more than work; experience and enjoy more than possess. In its cultural phase, the economy also shows playful traits. Theatrics and performance are becoming increasingly meaningful. Cultural production, that is, the production of information, increasingly adapts artistic processes. Creativity becomes its motto”, using Vilém Flusser’s reasoning about the moral of the thing.
What Chul-Han calls the cultural phase should be an in-depth analysis of the period of the cultural industry, radio, cinema and television, which was nothing more than a transition from merchandise to the imagination through advertising, where the brand and not the content, so not only are the work and the product alienated, but its very essence is alienated, using a term from the medieval period, as we have already analyzed in a previous post, it loses its quiddity, its identity and singularity, as it was the cultural industry that gave everything the appearance of sameness.
Also in the final section he will analyze things of the heart, and it is good to remember that these also had their singularity in the past, today transformed into an amoral and timeless character, in the wrong sense of the word, what is eternal is essence and singular and then returns to quiddity.
The final section says, things of the heart, recalling the fox’s dialogue with The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “The little prince asks the fox what “apprivoiser” means. To which the fox responds: “It’s something almost forgotten […]. It means becoming familiar, establishing relationships. […] For me, you are just a little boy like a hundred thousand others” and this is the loss of singularity, there it will introduce listening and the relationship with the Furthermore, these relationships cannot be developed without a moral conception.
The exposure of personal relationships, the end of private life through legal and illegal filming, the increasing exposure of even children, is increasing and amoral, there is no room for growth and respect for the morals of each age, not even old age, Rejected as moral and as an age of wisdom, it is increasingly common to expose this “good age” in a pejorative and amoral sense, without limits of respect (Chul-Han calls it symmetry in The Swarm) and a balanced morality.
Everything seen as “freedom”, but which plunges into “upheavals in the world of life”, the author’s subtitle, we are heading towards a civilizational crisis and the return depends not on things, but on a new morality of the state, of human relations and of public life.
Han, Byung-Chul (2022) Não-coisas : reviravoltas do mundo da vida / Byung-Chul Han ; tradução de Rafael Rodrigues Garcia. Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: ed. Vozes.
What are things
10
Jan
When rereading Byung Chul-Han’s “Non-Things”,
he correctly recalls that the term comes from Vilém Flusser, who lived in Brazil for a good part of his life, and also takes up the concepts of Hanna Arendt and Heidegger, but does not penetrate in the essence of the thing, which is not just information.
Medieval philosophers had already developed the question of quiddity, which is neither an idea nor a concept, but something that sought to understand the essence of things, from the Latin, “quidditas” means “what is that” and was related to the idea of identity and uniqueness.
Thus, by transforming it into information, it does what Luhman did with the concept (remember that this author deals more with the issue of communication than the thing in itself), he says, quoted by Byung Chul-Han: “His cosmology is a cosmology not of being, but of contingency”, that is, something that has no essence, no identity or singularity and cannot “be”.
Clarifying that it is a particular way of seeing information, as a “transmitted thing”, and in this the author is right: “Information cannot be possessed as easily as things. Possession determines the paradigm of the thing. The world of information is not governed by possession, but by access” (Han, 2022), this is so true that the Portuguese dictionary in Brazil now has a new word which is “logar”, from the English, log “registration” in the sense of marking access to “information”, in Chul-Han’s sense.
Quoting Jeremy Rifkin, Han warns that the transition from possession to access is a paradigm shift that leads to drastic change in the world of life, subtitle of the book, he predicts a new type of human being: “access, therefore, ‘access’ are key terms of the nascent era (Han, 2022).
Jeremy Rifkin, the transition from ownership to access is a profound paradigm shift that leads to drastic changes in the lifeworld. He even predicts the emergence of a new type of human being: “Access, ‘logon’, ‘access’ are the key terms of the nascent era. […]
Regarding the modified identity of the medieval sense, the author says: “We produce ourselves on social media. The French expression se produire means to put oneself on the scene. We act out. We perform our identity” (Han, 2022), mind you: it produces in the media Media are means, the confusion with the idea of networks, not on purpose of course, destroys the third characteristic of the thing which is its singularity, not in this essay, but in others, the author remembers that everything in the world is characterized by sameness, everything it looks very the same.
This world of “non-possession” is differentiated by enjoying more than living, it makes the “idealization of things” a task, it is not uncommon to see in programs and on social media a large number of utopian and bizarre questions, such as, what it would be if you were an object, if you lived on another planet, etc. and this amuses the public of non-things.
Revolutionaries should not be alarmed, but quoting Walter Benjamim, Chul-Han writes: “the deepest relationship one can have with things”, this substantiality is not materialistic but rather a rational and “informational” relationship with things, information here in another sense.
Han, Byung-Chul (2022) Não-coisas : reviravoltas do mundo da vida / Byung-Chul Han ; tradução de Rafael Rodrigues Garcia. Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 202
Being, the clearing and non-things
09
Jan
Studying the etymology of Glade, taking it from
Heidegger’s philosophy, it comes from the German word Lichtung, where in addition to the meaning of clearing in the forest (he himself lived for a few years in the black forest of Germany), while Licht is the word for light, it will mean hidden things, or entities whose truth must come to light, thus some translators use unveiling.
The light reminds us of what the magi followed, who were followed by a star that they carried until the birth of Jesus, they were probably Persian followers of Zoroaster, a painting from Ravenna (Picture in wall of Ravenna church, 526 DC) that is very old reveals the hats they wore and the pants that were from that region.
The clearing is, in the context of modern philosophy, what is hidden within a whole, where Being must emerge, and this seems more appropriate to modernity, since the fragmentation where only the part emerges, is most often opposed to the whole. to which the entity belongs, thus the question of Being.
The being that discovers itself, Heidegger himself stated: “lets itself be seen in its being and be discovered. The true-being (truth) of the statement must be understood in the sense of being-discoverer” (Heidegger, 1986, 219).
First we see this ontological truth as Being, and no longer as logic, second we see this relationship between knowing the object and the relationship with Being itself, which in modern philosophy could be called subjectivity, but it is not because they are not separate instances, However, separated from their object materiality they can become something beyond what was conceived until recently, the philosopher Byung Chul-Han wrote an essay about non-things, the world of digital objects where the “inflation of things deceives us into believing in opposite”.
The author will refer to the contemporary world as “As information hunters, we become blind to silent, discreet things, even ordinary things, trivialities or conventionalities that lack stimulation, but that we perceive in our daily lives”, and thus we plunge into a darkness of Being as opposed to clearing.
The digital order is making the world unearthly, unsubstantial, says the author in the preface: “Today, the earthly order is being replaced by the digital order. The digital order dethings the world by computerizing it” capturing a category from Vilém Flusser states: “Non-things are currently invading our environment from all sides, and are supplanting things. These non-things are called information”, citing Flusser’s work: Dinge und Undinge – Phenomenological Sketches. Munich, 1993, it is worth remembering that Flusser lived in Brazil from 1940 to 1972.
In this logic, silence, the vita (life) contemplative (another book by the author) escapes, and Being collapses.
Han, Byung-Chul (2022) Não-coisas : reviravoltas do mundo da vida / Byung-Chul Han ; tradução de Rafael Rodrigues Garcia. – Petrópolis, RJ : Vozes, 202
HEIDEGGER, M. Sein und Zeit. 17 ed. Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1986.
Humility and power
20
Dec
Polarizations and assertions of power are growing, this does not lead to symmetry, respect and goes in the opposite direction of humility, not that corny text typical of power, but that wisdom of those who know what they are and where they come from, the dust or humus, where the word comes from.
Humus is the Greek word that means earth and that updated in Portuguese became fertile land, from this same word the words “man” and “humanity” originate, and if it can be opposed to an idea of power, on the other hand it is not opposite to the idea of strength and wisdom.
For Hannah Arendt, power is inherent to any political community, but true leaders result from the human capacity to act together, under the consensus of all, and Byung Chul Han, who is a reader of Hannah Arendt, establishes that only symmetry where respect exists, which is the foundation of the public sphere, and where it disappears, it collapses, he writes in his book “The Swarm” which examines culture in the new social media.
Based on these recipes for power exercised in favor of and with the public sphere, it is possible to think of a power relationship with humility, true empowerment is not the exercise of force or even violence, but its suppression and the reestablishment of balance, dialogue and if possible, from consensus, true leaders seek this.
Yes, it is contrary to everything we are seeing and witnessing in the public sphere, the imposition of people, structures and ways of oppressing one part of the population in response to another that claims to be the owner of true privileges due to the violence suffered, however, that is, a vicious circle where violence is justified and perpetuated.
It is not by chance that wars grow with or without weapons, but considering that it is possible to subjugate the opposing group by this means is a delusion, since anyone who is subjected to some type of deprivation, without the humility that results from wisdom and fortress, will respond in kind and the principle of all war is exactly this.
We spoke in the previous post about matris in grêmio, generator of divine wisdom and strength, in the biblical text it says that the powerful looked at “the humility of his servant”, but even leaders and religious currents understand this “power” as the worldly one that oppresses the Other, which is the origin of so many apostasies and bad doctrines, not by chance end in abuse of power.
T he angel who announces the divinity of Mary’s conception (the name Conceição comes from there), is Gabriel which means fortress of God, in a society where arrogant, arrogant power predominates and which turns into dictatorial, it is understandable that the power of a fragile virgin and docile the divine will is incomprehensible, nothing more contrary to the oppressive false “power”.
Moderate realism and contemplation
06
Dec
It has already been stated that the rupture of the 
vita contemplativa was due to homo laborans, that is, in modernity when work becomes an economic imperative, especially for the poorest layers of society, at the beginning of the industrial revolution there was not even a time limit for workers and many industries disrespected even Saturday and Sunday.
However, the issue arose in the Middle Ages, organized work in monasteries, and many of the first Benedictine monks came from the nobility, was carried out for the first time by free men, and even the word “tripalium” from which work comes meant torture (gutting). .
While thought in this medieval period arises the quarrel of universals, there are several versions for its origin, but a widely accepted one is a fragment found in the writings of Boethius (480-525 AD), before Thomas Aquinas, he translated into Latin and commented Aristotle, albeit partially, and made an introduction to Aristotle’s “Categories”.
The dispute was about questioning whether these categories were real things that existed or just names that were given to things, hence the medieval realist and nominalist currents, which have reached our days with the issue of the linguistic shift recently revived.
The fact that these things exist or not means that we must see Being as a being of language, as argued by Heidegger, or simply a fruit of the material environment and its variations, it is not just current materialism derived from objectivism, but from a view of the subjective, after all that which is characteristic of being (subjective comes from subject).
Moderate realism in the Middle Ages approached, but placed limits on realism, for example from Thomas Aquinas, who, as Boethius will reread the work of Aristotle, in his Summa Theologiae, characterizes as reason and this is a forgotten root of modern rationalism .
Boethius, much earlier in his reading of Aristotle, makes the choice between a “transcendent” or extreme realism, more of a Platonic nature, and an “immanentist” or moderate realism, influenced by Aristotle. It is important to emphasize that Boethius was a reader of Porphyry with a strong influence.
The question left by Boethius was “whether” universals (categories) existed, just to exemplify the idea of animals that are generic horses or real horses with race, color and their species, and which can be understood in two comments:
“since that it is necessary, Chrysarius, to know, through the useful contemplation of these things, what is genus and what is difference, what is species and what is proper and what is accident, as much as in Aristotle … Next, I will certainly refuse to say, about genera and species, the following: do they subsist or are they placed in isolated and naked intellects? Subsistent, are they corporeal or incorporeal?” (Boethius, 1906, p. 147).
The issue deserves to be deepened since the “names” of things mean a language.
Boécio. (1906) In Isagogen Porphyrii Commenta. Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. 48. Vindo-bonae: F. Tempsky/ Lipsiae: G. Freytag.
