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Arquivo para a ‘SocioCibercultura’ Categoria

Walking towards a troubled future

13 Jul

Lectures and motivational books have been growing since the beginning of the 21st century, it doesn’t matter much the message, the important thing is to lead people to an action force that is performance.

Traditional religions lose adherents to churches that change the discourse of sin for self-help and the desire for recognition and success, political polarization does not leave this aside, a good politician must demonstrate his “deeds” and not his exemption, balance and honesty.

Far from disdaining technological evolution, it is important and can help in a co-immunological resumption, one in which we discover mutuality, the “exam” as described by Byung Chul Han only seeks performance and it can include disrespect and fake- News.

The repressive and disciplinary society of the 20th century described by Michel Foucault (Watch and Punish) loses space to a new form of coercive organization: neuronal violence, fanpages fill up, lives exhibiting performances and even exhibiting violence, which is worrisome.

Interiority, which is different from subjectivity, which is what is proper to the subject, is that internal space that we need to cultivate to make our lives more balanced, with more positive thoughts and actions and that collaborate with mutualism, the feeling of responsibility for the other, the social conscience, finally, the community (the immunological society).

Chul Han points out that subjectivity, already present in discourses of current thinkers, such as “post-industrial society” (Bell, 1999), “control society” (Deleuze, 1992), “cognitive capitalism” or “material economy” (Negri and Lazzarato, 2001, Gorz, 2005) and “biopolitics” (Foucault, 2008) were forms of expression of this subjectivity, however without resorting to interiority.

Society is pushed towards an excess of positivity as Chul Han calls it in his Society of Tiredness, the coercive disciplinary concept (“you shall”) imposed from outside, brought into the scene a new statement (“we can”), which, in its most immanent aspects, “refers to a false freedom by imposing on individuals the imperatives of performance and self-satisfaction.

The author’s analysis starts from the film Black Swan (Aronofsky, 2010) to explain his thesis, the imposition of performance and performance through self-overcoming is incorporated by the protagonist who is taken to the last consequences.

Today’s society of tiredness is nothing more than the unilateral absolutization of “positive power” and cognitive enhancement (neuro-enhancement) may not pose any moral problem, but it will lead to an even greater moral problem in the normativity of the performance society.

Han, Byung Chul. (2015) THE BURNOUT SOCIETY. Translated by ERIK BUTLER stanford briefs. An lmprint of Stanford University Press. Stanford, California.

 

Dialogue is the essential

09 Jul

The essential is far from modern society because it is required of every human being, even those who have some physical limitation or social difference, the maximum performance, Byung-Chul Han in his book Society of Tiredness (Brazil, Vozes, 2015), defines also as a performance society.

It projects us out of the essential, unlike an “immunological epoch” it is a “neuronal epoch”, the division between “inside and outside, friend and enemy or between self and stranger”, is defined as “attack and defense ” (HAN, 2015, p. 8) that is why it tends towards confrontation and not peace.

Peace requires dialogue, and the essential requires inner choices that move us to the outer essential.

This exhaustion of performance is what “disables us to do anything” (Han, 2015, p. 76) and dialogue becomes difficult, proselytizing or even mere rhetoric, but only it can lead to peace. Edgar Morin, who turned 100 (see previous post), established as a dialogical operator that capable of operator: reason and emotion, the sensitive and the intelligible, the real and the imaginary, reason and myths, and, science and art.

It can be seen that polarization is always on one side, it does not articulate “inside and outside” as proposed by Chul Han, so dialogizing is to admit the connection between these poles and not their mutual exclusion.

Due to the identity issue, strong in our times involving cultures, religions and nationalities, the pole between reason and myths becomes exacerbated where dialogue is difficult.

It is necessary to respect the different when dialoguing, also allowing the word and not excluding it with only rational arguments, there are ontological, historical, cultural, and social reasons for their arguments, and if we are not “disarmed” the dialogue does not take place.

When sending the disciples to bring the “good news”, the instructions given to the apostles are interesting, in Mk 6:8-10 he asks them not to take anything, not even purses or bags, and when they enter a house they wish for peace, and stay there until your departure, and the reading says that you cured the sick and cast out demons, the essentials and dialogue have this potential.

The unbalanced performance, tiredness and frivolity lead society to exhaustion and the difficulty of dialogue, because we are also full of convictions and reasons.

HAN, B.-C. (2015) Sociedade do Cansaço (Society of Burnout). Translation by Enio Paulo Giachini. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes.

 

Between Being, Nothing and interiority

01 Jul

The first ontological sensation, faced with rationality, was an attempt to confine Being in its subjectivity (which comes from the subject) in order to make the relationship with the Being an “objectivity” that exists outside of Being (for modernity outside the subject).

As both deny ex-sistence, here it means ex “to leave” and the verb sistere, “to be placed”, so to exist is what is placed outside the being, more than subjectivity is the very essence of Being, beyond of the imaginary and the symbolic, of the imaginary because it is unrepresentable and the symbolic because it means the non-meaning, but there are all essence and existence of Being.

The conception of denying the existence of being, which has to deny even the reason that conceives it, comes from Gorgias (485-380 BC), a sophist whom Plato refuted in a book, for him there was no truth and it can be said that it is the distant principle for relativism.

The existence and reality of Being, although veiled, lies in the possibility of a clearing, on which depends the opening of Dasein, its relationship with the physis (nature in the general sense of the Greeks) and for which the veil that covers the being, and so the relationship with being and interiority.

If we see ourselves only as we see in a mirror, we see the image of our being, if we see as we are, it means that we are able to see beyond it our interiority, our complexity and from them how we relate to the whole of which we are part.

The projection on the exteriority and denial of interiority is part of the emptying of Being in modernity, we are what we do and it doesn’t really matter what we actually are interiorly.

From this emptying, nihilism (nihil – nothing) was born, solipsism (the I and my sensations) and, in a way, subjectivism (considerations only about what is personal, an empty interiority) and a good part of theorizations values in ​​the infernal dichotomies (subject x object) and (nature x culture).

In a more current interpretation, in the Society of Tiredness Byung Chul Han speaks of interiority, in another book The Society of Transparency he states: “today the world is not a theater in which actions and feelings are represented and read, but a market where they are exposed , sells and consumes intimacies” (HAN, 2017, p. 80).

Han, Byung-Chul (2017). Transparency Society. Enio Paulo Giachini. Brazil: Petrópolis, Vozes, 2017.

 

 

From language to being

29 Jun

Language as speech and rhetoric is just what is externalized, but if thought of as ontology, it is the opening (Erschlossenheit) from the silent appropriation of the self, as Heidegger thought of Being and Time, whether the opening (offenheit) is thought of as clearing of being (lichtung des Seins), the one used by thinkers and poets, and which shows itself in the measure of its silent correspondence as being, expressed in Letter on Humanism.

In this text, he writes: “Destiny appropriates itself as a clearing of the Being, which it is, as a clearing. It is the clearing that grants the being’s proximity. In this proximity, in the clearing of Da Lugar, the man lives as a former caretaker, without him being able to experience and assume that dwelling today” (Heidegger, 1967, p. 61)

In general terms, language is a vehicle for the expression of something internal to man, that is, a bridge that links the inside and outside of man, such a way of speaking is thought of as an activity that takes place in which man is the very medium, that’s why there is silence before.

But according to the ontological conception of language, it is not language that belongs to man, but rather man himself conceived ontologically as a resolute being-toward-death or ontologically being that responds as mortal to the silent request of Being.

In more simplistic terms, this is the difference between the being that “has” a language, in the sense of the ability to speak, and the ontological conception that thinks man as “being” through being possessed of the ability to speak, the language here is not just the transmission of information, but the way in which human existence itself manifests.

In this context, communication begins with silence, an emptiness is needed, an epoché in communication, which presupposes an Other who will be a recipient, is not thus a receiver, but a destination of his speech, and this is the way in which human existence itself manifests. .

Thus for Heidegger, but also for Niklas Luhmann, it would be necessary to review the entire theory of Communication, since receiver and transmitter are themselves the non-human environment, and do not “replace” man, they cannot exist or have a relationship as if If man were something accessory, there is all the hallucination of the current Artificial Intelligence, putting receiver and transmitter in the place of source and destination, it would be necessary to foresee a “clearing” of the being “outside” of Being

For this reason, the clearing is internal, we have already posted in another opportunity what Heidegger affirms in his magnum work Being and Time: “Insofar as the being is in force from the aletheia, the self-unveiling emerging belongs to him. We call this the action of self-enlightenment and enlightenment, the clearing” (cf. Being and Time).

HEIDEGGER, Martin. Carta sobre o Humanismo (Letter on humanism). Brazil, Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, 1967, p. 61.

 

 

What is understanding

24 Jun

Understanding has become in the Western analytic structure a vicious circle that tends only to repeat what it considers to be true starting from some historical aphorism, what Gadamer calls romantic historicism in his criticism of Dilthey.

The forgetting of being ignores that the hermeneutic circle that goes from interpretation to a new understanding is the very structure of a new sense, a sense of existence, which is in Being.

Thus, the circularity of understanding is not primarily a logical requirement, based on an A or B method, but the ontological unfolding itself: “Heidegger’s hermeneutic reflection has its high point not in the fact that it demonstrates that a circle is present here, but a circle this has a positive ontological meaning” (GADAMER, 2013, p. 355).

Heidegger (2014), in his magna work Ser e Tempo, elaborated a hermeneutics of facticity based on the temporal analysis of human existence (Dasein), here facticity is the way of being in his Dasein that finds, in temporal existence, the possibility of revelation, of clearing:

“The structure of temporality appears as well as the ontological determination of subjectivity. But she was more than that. Heidegger’s thesis was that being itself is time” (Gadamer, 203, p. 345), here is the deepest essence of Heidegger’s work, which points to the hermeneutic circle:

“The decisive thing is not to leave the circle, but to enter it correctly. This circle of understanding is not an ordinary circle, in which any mode of knowledge moves, but it is the expression of the existential structure-of-previousness of Dasein itself. The circle must not be degraded into vitiosum nor be tolerated either. It shelters a positive possibility of the most original knowledge, a possibility that can only be truly realized in an authentic way, if the interpretation understands that its first, constant and last task consists in not letting the previous, the previous seeing and the preconception is given to it by occurrences and popular concepts” (Heidegger, 2014, p.433), but to address the same things.

Understanding seen in this way may seem too philosophical or a theorization about thinking, it is not, because, even in the oblivion of Being, the current frail structure of thought, this is the learning process that involves since the learning of language by a child even the most elaborate methods of discovery and innovation, or are just repetition of something already done, and thus without facticity, as it is mere repetition.

GADAMER, H-G. (2013) Truth and method Flávio Paulo Meurer, revision of the translation by Enio Paulo Giachini. 13. ed. Petropolis: Vozes; Bragança Paulista: São Francisco University Publisher, 2013.

HEIDEGGER, M. (2014) Ser e tempo Translation, organization, previous note, attachments and notes by Fausto Castilho. Campinas, SP: Publisher of Unicamp; Petrópolis, RJ: Editora Vozes, 2014.

 

 

The language as plurality

23 Jun

The problem of interpretation when we are thinking about language appears as a demonstrative proposition, it occurs when such an interpretation becomes unique and true, Heidegger’s proposal is one of the possibilities of language, but not the only or the main one, when we deal only with logic it does not understand the plurality of language.

This is present in what today is called narrative or discourse, we have already dealt with in several posts when we deal with Paul Ricoeur’s Living Metaphor, but here the issue is ontological: Being.

Science and technique, as well as the ideological narrative does not even touch the essential problem of the question of being, it is focused on what is called natural science or nature:

“natural science can only observe man as something simply present in nature (…) within this scientific-natural project we can only see him as a natural being, that is, we intend to determine the being-man through a method which was absolutely not projected in relation to its peculiar essence” (Heidegger, 2001, p. 53).

This is the reverie of tradition in the conception of language and truth, the one that brings the notion of finitude of being: being is time, for example, accelerating time we think of accelerating being, when in fact it is what causes its emptying , a common theme of the Heideggerians.

We separate the ontological Being from the existential, quoting Heidegger himself, because the analytic falls into another trap which is to link the being to the subject, copula and attribute, creating a structural possibility of language. It is tempting precisely because of its analytic composition, but deep down it is essentially logical and not ontological, Being escapes it.

Such evasion was already foreseen by Heidegger: “the essence of being in its multiplicity can never, in general, be collected from the copula and its meanings” (HEIDEGGER, 2003, p.391).

Language carries its own hermeneutic relationship. Heidegger, based on Being and Time, relocates the question of understanding and the search for truth, which was placed in the scope of the theory of knowledge, and launches it into the existential plane. In this way, the hermeneutic circle emerges, not tied to mere opinion or to functional logicism, nor to the analytic.

Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology brings to light the notion of logos as unveiling, highlighting their belonging to language as the place where the human inhabits, in its finiteness.

 

HEIDEGGER, M.(2001) Seminário de Zollikon Petrópolis: Vozes.

HEIDEGGER, M. (2003) Os conceitos fundamentais da Metafísica: mundo, finitude, solidão. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária.

 

 

The anguish, the finite being and the fear

18 Jun

Anxiety, as an essential category, is the most significant temporal fact of our existence, the fact that man has an end, that he dies and his existence ends, it is from there that Heidegger works on another concept which is the being-for- the-death [Sein-zum-tode].

Thus death is a limitation of the original unity of being-there, and it means human transcendence, the power-being, which contains a possibility of non-being, but here only as negation, “the end” of being-in-the-world it is death, this end limits the power-being, which is its existence, and limits the possible totality of Dasein (1989, vol. II, p. 12)

It is possible to separate fear from strong fear, leaving the first within the limits of the finite, and fear outside these limits, what the human imagination penetrates and projects as not being, beyond being-to-death, a being-for -beyond death is strong fear.

Byung Chul Han warns that like positivity, negativity is also dangerous: “it is defined by the negativity of prohibition. The modal verb that governs it is the ‘cannot’ (…) The society of performance, increasingly, is in the process of discarding negativity. Growing deregulation is abolishing this. The unlimited ‘power’ is the positive modal verb of the society of conquest (…) prohibitions, commands and laws are replaced by projects, initiatives and motivation. The society of discipline is still governed by the ‘no’. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, the performance society creates depressives and losers.”

Thus, it is possible to think of negativity as an important process, although it generates fear, and from it generate a process of fear, which, far from denying the prohibitions, demonstrates that they can lead us to broader results than those promised by performance, is the beyond-being.

Neither the transcendence of idealism that is mere projection of being onto the object, the so-called subjectivism, nor being-to-death as a fatal transcendence, but a fear produced by negativity that leads us to recognize limits, such as those that were imposed in the Pandemic and that do not generate death, nor are confused with the negationism that is the modal positive, denying that human life needs limits in dangerous situations.

The reading of the Bible of Apostle Mark (Mk 4,35-41), can, in this context of fear, reveal new things about being, the reading says that “when dismissing the crowds”, Jesus went with the disciples “to the other shore”, I would say far from the being-there of the pure positivity of being-in-the-world, the boat faces a strong wind and strong waves begin to fill the boat, fear takes over the disciples, they strong fear for death and they say to the master “we are perishing”, the Master says to the wind and the sea: “shut up”.

It isnt magic or a simple demonstration of power, the phrase spoken by Jesus explains a lot: “Why are you so afraid? Do you still not have faith?”, but they still felt “a great fear”, it is the anguish.

 

 

Anguish and fear of existence

17 Jun

The constitutive feature of Dasein, in Heidegger, goes beyond the psychological and ontic phenomenon, not being something that refers only to a being or something given, it refers to the totality of being as a being-in-the-world, that is, its true dimension ontological, in it the anguish of Being is explained.

The category emerged with Kierkegaard but for him anguish reveals our finite being, the nothingness of our existence in the face of God’s infinity, due to its eternal character, while Heidegger does not think only as an ontological category, making it just a phenomenon of finitude human.

Stuck with human finitude, Heidegger finds the difference between anguish and fear (furcht), but in the work Being and time, fear is also a fundamental existence through which man finds himself in the world (Heidegger, 1989) and this makes the anguish a mild stage.

Fear, on the other hand, constitutes a strong anima disposition for the author [Befindlichkeit] it is it that reminds us of something we fear and with this the whole of the world manifests, in its strangeness and amazement, it is what happens before we can perform an act knowledge of the world.

There is in it a force to reveal the world, even if at first it is just an escape, in it, for example, joy or happiness, explains the author are very transitory and less striking, this being-there is cast [geworfen] in the middle to states of mind, able to support the weight of existence, and in it “Humour makes manifest ‘how we feel’. In this ‘how we feel’, being willing brings the Being in its being-there” (HEIDEGGER, 1986, p. 134).

More precisely, or more in line with Heidegger’s thought, fear is a central disposition in our existence because it manifests the world in the actor of being-there from itself, even though man is the theme The aim of Heidegger and Kierkegaard, the ultimate address of both is fear not as an object outside himself, but rather itself: man only fears for something determined because he is ultimately affected and interested.

I digress because being “outside” to the contemporary world, Byung Chull Han and Hanna Arendt have taken up in a different way the “being inside” in the “contemplative vitta”, in Heidegger fear turns to the one who fears and not to the one who fears , in Kierkegaard the fear is God, but already in the period of idealism projected onto the world, not as a Being “outside”

What is important in Heidegger’s discourse is that it manages to establish three forms of fear: the one that [wofür] we fear something, that which threatens us (the difficulties of co-presence), the very fear [fürchten] as such, which opens up to us the world (Sloterdijk’s spheres help this reflection), and, and the reason [worum] we fear, which is our own being-there.

Finally, fear can have variations: it can be what’s frightening; it can be horror and also disappointment” (Heidegger, 1986, p.142), but the difference between fear and fear would help to better separate Heidegger’s category from Kierkegaard, that fear is of something “greater”.

HEIDEGGER, M. (1989) Ser e Tempo Traduçăo de Márcia de Sá Cavalcanti. Petrópolis: Vozes.

 

 

The being in its authenticity

16 Jun

Heidegger’s incursion into what social life is is that it is governed by an obscure notion of what coexistence is, where there are no subjects but an empire of the impersonal, of the empire that the translation into Portuguese is very good, empire of “we” is a truncated sociability, it is not just individualism, but a place where neither the “I” nor the “we” are distinguished.

This individual space is the one that levels everything down, a loss of Dasein in the open space of “public opinion” (Öffentlichkeit]), a truncated sociability, even us does not include the Other.

In this being there of Dasein to what extent he deals with other people in his daily environment, for this Heidegger takes a step in the determination of existential analytic, which is to answer how the world opens to Dasein, regardless of whether it is the world of things or of men, this can be understood by how he sees the opening to the world.

He sees it as a first and fundamental opening in a triple way: the disposition, the understanding and the interpretation, understanding that this makes him involved with the world.

So first the human being is taken by states of the soul that unreflectively open the world to him, usually through a certain deviation, a disposition, he understands the world not as a theory or concepts, but as Dasein itself is understood in a situation.

Thus disposition becomes understanding, but it is not man who understands the world, but the world understands man in a totalizing way, where the whole human being is under-stood (in sense of under-pres) and this refers to the concept of project (Entwurf) in an essential sense: it is designed in the world.

This project gives man the possibility of interpretation, and only then manages to translate the world into speech and language, considering that the proposition and the utterance always imply a later moment in the existence of Dasein.

It is these openings to the world in speech and language, however, that must take into account the proposition and utterance as implying a moment, always later, in the existence of Dasein, but the tendency to cover up in Dasein is always strong so that it becomes free.

This fundamental trait of concealment and escape from oneself asserts itself and determines the being-in-the-world of the being-there (Heidegger, 1989) raises the question of the possibility of the being-there leaving its inauthenticity.

HEIDEGGER, M. (1989) Ser e Tempo Translation by Márcia de Sá Cavalcanti. Petropolis: Vozes.

 

 

What humanism are we talking about

15 Jun

It is common to establish a connection between ontology studies and the question of existence, the philosopher Paul Sartre did, but neither the ontological tradition of scholasticism nor Heidegger make this connection, the latter emphasized: “The main statement of existentialism has nothing in common with that statement of Being and time” (HEIDEGGER, 1996, p. 329).

In his 1947 Letter on Humanism, Heidegger states that what distinguishes man is his relationship with being and the way in which he protects being, and not insofar as he is defined as a being endowed with reason, he himself criticizes humanism, for him what there is is a forgetting of being, which is diagnosed in every western philosophical tradition, starting with Plato and extending to Nietzsche.

The theme of being characterized in Western thought, which has incipient roots in the pre-Socratics, since it predates “episteme”, is again taken up from Heidegger as a “fundamental ontology”, that is, with the possibility of questioning the be, and like this questioning, the humanism of every man.

It is necessary, while discussing ontology, to understand that Dasein, Heidegger’s being-there, is concerned with examining how the first, the original understanding of man in his very essence, takes place, even before the moment of formulating a theory or of having consciousness, theory arrives at a later time and consciousness gives after man’s opening to Being.

To understand what Heidegger characterizes as existence, one can read: What is metaphysics? (1929), which reads: “The word existence designates a way of being and, without a doubt, of the being of that being that is open to the opening of being, in which it is located, while sustaining it” (Heidegger, 1989, p .59).

Thus, the objective of the fundamental ontology of Being and Time is the being who is placed as a privileged being and who is able to question the being, who has an understanding of being [Seinsverständni], and this being is man, and from him what thought humanism.

It is true that there is a criticism of Peter Sloterdijk in “Rules for the human park: a response to letters about humanism”, which questions anthropocentrism, our relationship with nature.

 

Heidegger, M. (1989). Ser e Tempo Translation by Márcia de Sá Cavalcanti. Petropolis: Voices.

______. (1989) What is metaphysics? Translation by Ernildo Stein. São Paulo: Abril Cultural. (Os Pensadores collection).