Arquivo para a ‘SocioCibercultura’ Categoria
Symmetry and diversity
13
Oct
Every relationship of power is asymmetrical, discussing the
power of the [media] of social networks, in his essay book “No Swarm” said the Korean-German Byung Chul Han: “power is an asymmetrical relationship. It fundamentals a hierarchical relationship. The power of communication is not dialogic. Unlike power, respect is not necessarily an asymmetrical relationship” (p. 18), so the question remains how power could be symmetrical and how dialogic communication.
Collective, communal and original societies always have some form of hierarchy and most of them have developed forms of dialogical communication, modernity is perhaps the historical moment of greatest hierarchy and where communication becomes more problematic, it is necessary to return to basic concepts about who is the other and what form of power is lawful”?
The worst of the scenarios come true, this is the point that Byung Chul Han is right: the swarm, but it is necessary to understand the process of development that comes from the Cartesian-Kantian rationalism-idealism, where the center is the objective truth, without space for subjectivity, it is not by chance that ethical and moral concepts have lost value, said the Kantian categorical imperative: age in such a way that its conduct is a universal model, but who is this “ideal”, “rational” being?
We know that in nature there is always some asymmetry, for example, the sides of the human body.
The answer is not so difficult if we understand diversity, there is no “individual” model that is a standard for everyone, nor is there an objective way to express power, but one that induces an entire collectivity to loving solidarity, protecting the weakest and negotiation in disputes.
It took us two thousand years, if we consider the Christian model of brotherhood, to understand that the only possible model of dialogue is respect for the Other (in Chul Han’s concept, respect is symmetrical, but it cannot cancel out diversity, a perfect symmetry is not Natural).
We are so trained and conditioned to a standard model that we call it “straight”, in analogy to an ideal line, since any object in nature that is straight will have some imperfection, and so Kant’s categorical imperative is only possible in the idealistic imagination.
Society, in its various forms of “bubbles”, did not institute and develop trust, but control, a form of power for everyone to conform to the ideal model of a certain ideal group.
The human purpose and its finitude
24
Sep
Unlike the machine that has the environment as its purpose
(see previous post), the human purpose is to reaffirm existence through the perpetuation of life, and also everything that is alive can and should defend this existence, as explained by Edgar Morin:
“The impositions that inhibit enzymes, genes, and even cells, do not diminish a freedom that does not exist at this level, as freedom only emerges at a level of individual complexity where there are possibilities of choice; they inhibit qualities, possibilities of action or expression” (MORIN, 1977, 110), machines are not without purpose, but whatever they are, they are means.
But this freedom when it is at the human level, and it is “only at the level of individuals who have possibilities of choice, decision and complex development that impositions can be destructive of freedom, that is, become oppressive” (idem) .
It is the development of human culture that can develop these potentialities, as Morin says: “It is certainly culture that allows the development of the potentials of the human spirit” (ibid.), it depends, therefore, on the development of a culture of peace, solidarity and of preserving life within the human spirit.
Morin will say in the chapter of his conclusion on the “complexity of Nature”, that in the so-called “animistic” universe, or mythological in the case of the Greeks, “human beings were conceived in a cosmomorphic way, that is, made of the same fabric as the universe.” (MORIN, 1977, p. 333).
This presence of what Morin calls “generativity”, the animated and animating beings, all existing within the universe, implied a communication between the spheres: the physis, life and anthroposocial, if we extend these concepts to Sloterdijk’s spherology: anthropotechnic.
But as we reasoned a few posts ago, the separation of physis into nature (animate) and physics (inanimate) not only “disenchanted the universe, but also desolated it.”
He completes his reasoning with a sentence that shows our multiple crises and nights: “There are no more geniuses, nor spirits, nor souls, nor soul; there are no more gods; there is a God, strictly speaking, but elsewhere (the emphasis is on the author); there are no longer existing beings, with the exception of living beings, which certainly inhabit the physical universe, but come from another” (idem).
Thus he concludes that nature was returned to poets and physis to the Greeks, and so the universe of techniques (which are means) dominated life (which is purpose) and so “science and technique generate and manage, like gods, a world of objects” (MORIN, 1977, p. 334).
It does not let finalism (or fatalism) be the last word: “it is from the crisis of this science that new data and notions that allow us to reconstruct a new universe come out” (idem), quantum physics, from the third included (the quantum between two quanta) and entropy/neguentropy are renewed.
Every universe is “anima”, the theologian Teilhard Chardin also agrees with this thesis, and also that life is the complexification of the universe, in which the human phenomenon is its apex.
In addition to the animist or mythological interpretation for these purposes of life, which is death and life in life in death, a Heraclitian principle also cited by Morin, the Christian reflection on the passages already cited above about who Jesus is (Mk 8,27 and Mc 9,31), and He must suffer greatly.
It is complemented by the question about abandoning what is the transitory purpose of life (therefore only means) and if it is not useful for the ultimate purpose (and therefore, they are only means and should be relativized) if your hand, your foot or your eye leads you to sin (forget the ultimate end of human life which is the eternity of life) it is better to lose them to have the living purpose.
But his last word is to accept those who see this reality differently, if they are not against us, it is in our favor (Mk 8, 40) and (Mk 8,41) and “whoever gives you a drink of water , because ye are of Christ, he will not remain without receiving his reward”, so many can cooperate with the growth of the human anima, with the life and living Nature on which we all depend.
MORIN, E. (1977) The nature of NATURE. Lisbon PUBLICATIONS EUROPA-AMERICA, LDA.
The finality of beings and machines
23
Sep
Edgar Morin says that “we are therefore in the prehistory
of finality”, using the Hegelian discourse he will say “the whole ‘itself’ becomes almost a for-itself” (Morin, 1977, p. 242), and so the machine living (to differentiate from artificial ones) from soft cells to the most complex living organisms “are almost specialized in function of quasi-programmed tasks that aim to achieve ends, and all these ends are united in the global end: to live” (idem).
It can be said then, in the author’s expression, that “this living being that self-finalizes is the product is the finished product of the reproductive act that originated it” (ibid.), and “retracing” this to the origin of life, the question remains “how is the purpose born of the non-purpose?” (MORIN, 1977, P. 243).
You will then ask what kind of “information” is capable of reproducing and controlling proteins with which they were not yet associated? The idea of information, and therefore of program, and therefore of purpose, cannot be prior to the constitution of a first protocellular ring” (idem), it will conclude from there that “the idea of a final process before the appearance of the life”, perhaps here we separate artificial machines from living beings, its beginning.
He will say in a categorical and essential way that “the biological, and evidently anthropo-sociological, purpose is immersed in a recurrent process of self-generation of which it is a part. It is the immersed and informational face of this generation-of-itself” (ibidem), for those who believe, I say that this is what I think is “God’s image and likeness”, being in an original vital process.
Living and artificial machines will have in common, according to the author, “purposes of the origins of life have repercussions and are reflected in the global purposes of living machines, and even of artificial machines” (MORIN, 1977, p. 243).
It will further differentiate the artificial machine from the live, quoting Paul Valéry: “Artificial means that it tends towards a defined end and, therefore, it opposes live”, for example, the purpose “of a manufacturing is to manufacture cars, whose purpose it is displacement, which serves for constructive activities of the individual’s life in society and of society in the individual” (Morin, 1977, p. 244).
So while the machine has an extrinsic purpose of life, and this purpose should have the intrinsic purpose of biological life, these “complementary purposes can become concurrent and antagonistic, as happens with the purposes of individual existence and reproduction…” (Morin , 1977, p. 245), if they become antagonistic, they can lead to the exclusion of one purpose for the other.
And so, concludes this topic Edgar Morin> “in Homo sapiens, gastronomic pleasures and erotic enjoyments become ends to the detriment of feeding and reproductive purposes; knowledge, a means of surviving in an environment, becomes, in the thinker turned thinker, to which his own existence subordinates” (MORIN, 1977, pp. 245-246).
Thus ends shift, degenerate and become uncertain, like the future of civilization.
MORIN, E. (1977). A natureza da NATUREZA. Lisboa PUBLICAÇÕES EUROPA-AMÉRICA, LDA.
Ethics in the morals of Paul Ricoeur
25
Aug
In his 1990 text, Paul Ricoeur has already elaborated what he called
a little ethics, simplified into three theses:
- the priority of ethics over morals, that is, the priority of the life of the good life (comes from the Greek concept of goodness), with and for others, in just institutions, over the moral norm;
- The need, however, that the ethical approach (here opposes the Hegel/Kantian ethics) through the sieve of the moral norm: this passage from ethics to morality, with its imperatives and its prohibitions, is, as it were, demanded by the ethics, insofar as the desire for the good life meets violence in all its forms; and,
- the legitimacy of a recourse from the moral norm to the ethical aim, when the norm leads to conflicts and for which there is no other way out than practical wisdom, the creation of new decisions in difficult cases, such as in law , in everyday life and in medicine.
Ricoeur clarifies that neither in the etymology of the words, nor in the history of the use of the terms, there is no clear distinction between morals and ethics, but there is a nuance in the term ethics “for the aim of a life carried out under the sign of good deeds” , and the moral term “towards the obligatory side, marked by norms, obligations, interdictions characterized at the same time by a demand for universality and an effect of coercion” (Ricoeur, 1991a, p. 256).
In this sense, its “ethical aim” must be understood, nor is it restricted to the field of personal freedom, since it admits “the requirement of universality and an effect of coercion” nor is it limited to institutional ethics since it must be “under the sign of good esteemed actions”.
It is thus possible to distinguish more clearly in his ethical approach, the distinction between two inheritances, the Aristotelian “ethics characterized by its teleological perspective (from telos, which means ends), and the Kantian deontological inheritance (“morality is defined by character from the norm’s obligation and, therefore, from a deontological point of view (deo of “duty”).
Thus, his analysis, rather than excluding one or another thesis of modern ethics, complements both the work of Nicomachean Ethics, by Aristotle, and the Grounds of Moral Metaphysics and Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, but without the need for to be faithful to the orthodoxy of neither is not an evasive solution, but an inclusive one.
RICOEUR, Paul. (1991). Éthique et morale, Lectures 1: Autour du politique. Paris, Seuil, Pp. 256-269.
Crisis of thought and cynical reason
17
Aug
Modern thought is still strongly linked to idealism, there are several points to
question Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, two points that I consider central: the subject and object dualism (called the infernal dichotomy by Bruno Latour) and the transformation of eidos Greek in an abstract idea, almost all contemporary Western philosophy is heir to Kant.
The crisis of Greek “democracy” (questionable because slaves and women did not participate) happened amidst the crisis of sophistic thinking, founded on relativism and the justification of power, the art of rhetoric and oratory and the power of argumentation was worth more than the truth.
There, too, another infernal dichotomy is born: between nature (phýsis) and culture (nómos), after all, what is nature and what we mean by culture when we distance it from experience and techné.
Sloteridjk is one of the rare Western philosophers who will question without losing the rationalist and progressive slant, both the classic current models of argumentation and Adorno and Horkheimer, Sartre and Foucault, neither escapes nor Heidegger, who in a way is also heir, by questioning his Charter on Humanism, and thinking about what humanism actually is today.
What you call culture, for example, can show the contradiction, giving the example of China where you can eat dog meat and in India you can’t eat beef, which is a sacred animal.
The point that I consider most central is the explanation of modern relativism, since this was also the foundation of the Greek sophists, there everything that referred to practical life could be changed, so both religion and politics were considered cultural factors and could be modified is convergent, according to Sloterdijk with modern thought, according to his analysis of the concepts of cynicism and kynisms, its founder Antisthenes of Athens (445-365 BC) preached a simple life as a wild life (in nature, the word kynós means dog), the figure of Diogenes in his barrel is the most emblematic (in the painting above, Jean Leon Gerome).
Although a disciple of Socrates, unlike Plato, he opted only for the stereotype of the master, as opposed to educating and organizing an “episteme”, he will make everything simple and relative.
The context of these sophists was the city-state and the democracy of Athens which was in crisis.
The second part of Sloterdijk’s book is a critique of applied cynicism, structured in four parts: physiognomic, phenomenological, logical and historical.
Sloterdijk, P. Critique of Cynic Reason, trans. Marco Casanova et al., Brazil, SP: Estação Liberdade, 2012.
The orgic birth
13
Aug
How modern knowledge can give birth to a new world, overcome
the humanitarian crisis (which is beyond the pandemic), overcome the crisis of thought warned by so many thinkers Bachelard and the new science, Husserl and the crisis of scientific thought, Morin and the crisis of humanitarian thought, which Sloterdijk also criticized by revising Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism”.
Reviewing the three changes, in antiquity Socrates through Plato gave birth to the episteme that surpassed the sophist model and Plato organized the model of the city-state, with the limitations that did not entitle women and slaves, a model that collapses along with the Roman empire, we inherited the law from them, but in what was translated the natural law: in the social contract.
The modern republic comes precisely from a discussion of what human nature is, the anthropocentrist model ignored the Being and its relationship with the Being, it is not just about the relationship with Nature, but with human nature itself, which is also a phenomenon.
We have already posted here about the orgic change, the relationship with nature itself and with ours, which Sloterdijk calls “matrix in grêmio” (picture), an appropriate name for Christian eschatology, where there is the female figure as the promoter of this orgic change, the relationship tense with nature that will bring profound changes in the planet and in the human relationship.
What we developed in our previous post about aorgic mutation was the necessary overcoming of anthropocentrism, the nature of nature (developed in Edgar Morin’s Method I), the place of man in nature (the title of one of Teilhard Chardin’s books) and many others point out that anthropocentrism is a paradox, we are co-dependent and co-participants of Nature.
But nature shows signs of agony, climate change is just a symptom, the very structure of the planet (volcanoes, earthquakes, etc.) can profoundly and dangerously alter the planet, remember the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters, and polarization behind the danger of war.
In Christian eschatology, the book of the Apocalypse of St. John reads (Rev. 12-19a-12): “The Temple of God in heaven was opened and the Ark of the Covenant appeared in the Temple. Then a great sign appeared in heaven: a Woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of twelve stars”.
Theologians and exegetes shuffle over this passage, of course the figure of Mary comes to the fore, but the temple of God is nothing more than the universe and nature, including human nature, and the crown of twelve stars, the doses tribes of Israel, but curiously the European flag has two stars too, and metaphorically I would say that it represents a more united world, in the initial European model because it also suffered cracks like the English Brexit.
The orgic change is a possibility not a fatality, and everything depends on human action, as the centenary philosopher Morin says, one can hope and believe in change.
Metaphor and speculation
03
Aug
There is nothing in philosophical discourse (or in well-
structured thinking) that is free from presuppositions.
In the living metaphor, Paul Ricoeur clarifies that this is “for the simple reason that the work of thought by which a region of the thinkable is thematized brings into play operational concepts that cannot, at the same time, be thematized” (Ricoeur, 2005, p. 391).
These postulates are fundamental to understanding discourse, rhetoric and mere speculation.
Paul Ricoeur makes this study around the questions: “Which philosophy is involved in the movement that leads the investigation from rhetoric to semantics and from meaning to reference? “(idem).
It will be in the answer to these questions, and “without reaching the conception suggested by Wittgenstein of a radical heterogeneity of language games” (Ricoeur, 2005, p. 392) it is possible to recognize: “in its principle, the discontinuity that ensures the speculative discourse its autonomy” (idem).
Not explained by Ricoeur, but Edgar Morin talks about two roots of modern discourse that lead speculative discourse to a modern form of obscurantism: the closure in areas of overly specialized knowledge, which he calls hyperspecialization.
Here, metaphor can be confused with mere speculation and philosophy would be “induced by the metaphorical functioning, if it could show that it only reproduces, on the speculative level, the semantic functioning of poetic discourse” (idem).
He clarifies that the touchstone of this misunderstanding is “the Aristotelian doctrine of the analogical unity of the multiple meanings of being, ancestor of the medieval doctrine of the analogy of being” (idem) which we will return to in the next post to understand the metaphysical limitations of Aristotelian ontology.
The second, more fundamental clarification is the categorical discourse, where “there is no transition between poetic metaphor and transcendental equivocality” which is the conjunction between theology and philosophy “in a mixed discourse” that creates confusion between analogy and metaphor” (Ricoeur , 2005, p. 393), and would this imply “a sub-reption, to return a Kantian expression?” (idem), for this reason it is necessary to return to the metaphysical question and in it the ontological question.
He quotes as an epigraph Heidegger’s statement that “the metaphorical only exists within metaphysics”, this is the heart of this work by Ricoeur, and he calls it a “second navigation”, an allusion to Jacques Derridá’s “Mytologie blanche”, passing from living metaphor to dead metaphor.
Ricoeur, P. (2005) Metáfora viva. trad. Dion David Macedo. Brazil, SP: Ed. Loyola.
Spirituality and Worldview
27
Jul
Spirituality is the search for meaning in life, it can stop at
the physis, which for the Greeks was nature, or it can go beyond and contemplate the meta-physis, which means μετα (metà) = after, beyond all; and Φυσις [physis], that is, beyond nature and physics.
Thus, a spirituality that stops in nature, the explanation for example of the origin of the universe, even if it is a physical worldview, lacks an eschatological worldview that explains the origin and end of everything, will at some point fall into sophistry and nihilism, as the sophist Gorgias (485-380 BC) nothing exists.
If nothing exists, the meaning of life is meaningless, much is superficially explored the meaning of life, for many it is just being happy, it is still a limited worldview, pain and suffering are part of life, so it is necessary to go through them for the life actually makes sense.
Spirituality needs a worldview, or if you prefer the more philosophical term, a worldview (Weltanschauung), used in an almost opposite way by Kant and Heidegger, while Kant uses it as idealistic transcendence (from subject to object), Heidegger it returns to the metaphysical tradition, with the purpose of distancing itself from it.
The concept of eidos (in Greek is form and essence) transformed into an idea, and the separation of the subject from the object, relegated the questions of the spirit (not even spirituality can be called) to the field of subjectivity, the starting point of the philosophical movement called German idealism it was the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), ending fifty years later with the death of Hegel (1770-1831).
Martin Heidegger starts by questioning the meaning of being of being-there. This is because “this term does not mean only the conception of the connection between natural things, but, at the same time, an interpretation of the meaning and purpose of the human being there and, therefore, of history [Geschichte]” (HEIDEGGER, 2012, p. 13).
Much of what is called spirituality is actually just a search for meaning in life, a mental exercise that is different from the spiritual, lacks an ascesis, a true “ascension”, so it always returns to physis, nature or to the ground.
A complete worldview must go beyond the fact and reach intentionality, everything exists with an intention, to be aware is “to be aware of something”, as Husserl’s phenomenology thinks, so awareness of the “universe” therefore has an intention of the existence of the universe , which is part metaphysical and part spirituality, something or someone has (and didn’t have) a primary intention, something big, infinite, superior to nature, the universe and everything we know, something ineffable.
HEIDEGGER, Martin. (2012) O problema fundamental da fenomenologia. (The fundamental problems of phenomenology(. Trans.: Marco Antônio Casanova. Petrópolis, Brazil: Vozes.
Civilization and being’s malaise
15
Jul
The phrase widely used in literature and sometimes in
the public domain is from Freud: Civilization and its malaise, however, is not only in the field of psychology, the author clarified to be: “impossible to despise the extent to which civilization is built on the renunciation of instinct , how much exactly does it presuppose the non-satisfaction (by oppression, repression, or some other means?) of powerful instincts. This “cultural frustration” dominates the vast field of social relationships among human beings. … It is not easy to understand how it can be possible to deprive an instinct of satisfaction. This is not done with impunity. If the loss is not economically compensated, one can be sure that serious disturbances will result from it”. (Freud, 1930/1997, p. 118).
See that “oppression, repression or some other means” belongs to the author, who could hardly imagine a digital world capable of this, and cultural frustration placed in quotation marks by the author dominates relationships, and who states even more curiously that the search for “economic compensation” is a refuge.
But this was registered in other areas as well, Edmund Husserl wrote about the crisis of the sciences: “In the urgency of our life – we have heard it said – this science has nothing to say to us. It initially excludes precisely the questions that, for men of our unfortunate times, abandoned to the most fateful revolutions, are the pressing questions: the questions about the meaning or absence of meaning of all human existence” (The crisis of the European sciences ), one can also speak of the crisis or night of God, of the identity and the oblivion of Being.
Thus, in Postmodernity, if we dispense with superegoic resources in the Freudian sense, what assures us a cultural mask is the dispute between nations and a new form of defense of honor, for example, which are disguises for the various types of urban violence, the drug addiction, the new presence now of psychopolitics that drives us to consumption and polarization and angers us.
This omnipresence of violence camouflaged in different social relations is what characterizes the end of respect that characterizes a healthy distance between I and the Other, or we include the equal that is my mirror, or we violently repel as an Other.
FREUD, S. (1997). O mal-estar na civilização. In Obras psicológicas completas de Sigmund Freud: edição standard brasileira (Vol. 21, pp. 75-174). Rio de Janeiro: Imago. (Original publicado em 1930). (Civilization and its Discontents)
Topology of Violence
14
Jul
The book Topology of violence (original: Topologie der Gewalt),
can be considered a continuation of the analysis of Sociedade do Cansaço, in which it shows why society is on the brink of collapse, and shows that at the same time a general thesis about its disappearance, a war trend that now gives way to the other, changing its way of operating.
His ideas about violence are innovative and out of common sense, which always thinks of the modern conception of society in freedom, individuality and personal fulfillment, goes in search of the dark side of the subject, where he begins.
This violence is the one that tends to eliminate the other, anonymous, “subjective” and systemic, which is not revealed as it accepts the antagonist’s freedom.
His concept of violence is then that which he defines as functioning in a free individuality, motivated by the activity of persevering and not failing, and with the ambience of efficiency he renounces even making sacrifices at the same time, but entering a whirlpool of limitation, self-exploration and collapse.
All this has a relationship with seduction, which he explained in an interview with El Pais newspaper that seduction cannot be confused with buying: ““I think that not only Greece, but also Spain, are in a state of shock after the crisis financial . The same happened in Korea after the Asian crisis. The neoliberal regime radically implements this state of shock. And here comes the devil, which is called liberalism or the International Monetary Fund, and gives money or credit in exchange for human souls.”
All this to increase credit and give greater incentive to supposed efficiency, and he explains that in the end: “We are all exhausted and depressed. The fatigue society in South Korea is now in a deadly stage,” revealing the little-known side of the country he came from and who speaks property.
And it’s not a happier society, he explains, “the invisible doesn’t exist, so everything is delivered naked, without secret, to be devoured immediately, as Baudrillard said”, he explains that everything should have a veil, however thin, an interiority.
Arroyo, Francesc. Aviso de derrumbe (Crash warning). interview by Byung Chul Han to the daily El País, Spain.
