Arquivo para a ‘SocioCibercultura’ Categoria
Fight for peace, meekness and justice
02
Oct
The history of mankind is to this day a war story of the Same against the Other,
the book The Expulsion of the Other by Byung-Chul Han is nothing more than the realization of this reality. It is our destiny, a fatality, I think not, when peace has been spoken of most, if war is spoken of, peace can be thought of, the Earth as a human homeland.
The challenges are immense, and fears grow with each new authoritarian government, it is good to say there are also islands of the left and right-wing stronghold that are only “elected” people.
I do not think of resistance or opposition, I still think of transformation, the great setback that happens in all humanity, if it were located it would be easy to have only one reading: we can not go forward, the nostalgists say: “how good was those time” , which ?
To fight for peace must also be for justice and against all sorts of oppression, to magnify simple wisdom and to understand that it takes depth to be simple, a “sophistication” as Leonardo da Vinci said, and to establish a spirit of meekness where it is possible to think.
Not without realizing an excessive dose of authoritarianism is time to ask, what is the exact place of the state in everyday life? its abrupt interference even in the personal life is but a form of authoritarianism? we have cameras and radars every kilometer, it’s not an exaggeration.
Weapons for peace, does not make the slightest sense, more weapons more violence, never the other way around. They remember the biblical beatitudes Mt 5,5: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth,” of course what you see today is power in the hand of rabid and authoritarian, but it is not the end.
The following long verse is practically a warning to justice Mt 5: 6: “Blessed are the hungry and righteous, for they shall be filled,” and further Matthew 5: 9: “those who promote peace, because they will be called children of God “, did humanism die? The fact that everyone, or at least a large part of humanity, has a perception that something needs to be done urgently to overcome the “dangers against humanity” challenges us.
There is an urgent need for global governance, not less urgent income distribution programs. The ecological collapse, and in the big metropolis also the urban demand global measures.
I remember the two beatitudes as a stimulus for those struggling for humanity suffer persecution, injustice and slander. Mt 5,11 “Blessed are you when they revile you and persecute you, and when they lie, they shall say all manner of evil against you for my sake,” that is Christianity, the rest wickedness
The state is naked or in new clothes
01
Oct
Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The emperor’s new clothes seem to be the origin
of the phrase “king is naked”, which tells the story of a king who spent his life preoccupied with his clothes and one day found two charlatans who claimed to have one cloth that quickly turned cloths into clothes.
Costumed the king gave them a good sum of money and the two went to work with a fictitious yarn, when the king’s day premiered his clothes will seek it and although he sees nothing, he wears the imaginary clothes and goes to a a great procession without any clothes, but his subjects also pretend that the king is dressed, until they pass by a child that innocent that is said that the king did not wear anything, the father asks her to shut up, because the King does not put himself in question.
So today is the state situation, corruptions and desmandos are everywhere, in some places there are punishments, but most people prefer to believe that the modern state has its reason to exist, after all the rulers are necessary and democratically elected.
It turns out that rulers who are true caricatures of dictators, even their time has passed, such as the Welfare State (the extension of the concept of citizenship to the end of post-war totalitarian governments) is over now we are in the aftermath and the state is naked .
The king represents the belief in norms and conventions, which in the case of the state is his constitution and his interpretations, in the human case is the impossibility of seeing something beyond his immediate interests, as the king was his beautiful clothes and that makes him bet in magical clothing.
The robes are new, but the empires that haunt everyone are already known.
There is no magic, a ruined economy, a decadent education and a growing violence in Brazil.
ANDERSEN, H. C. The Emperor’s New Clothes,USA: Parragon-books. 2005.
Between the logic of prohibition and permissiveness
28
Sep
The fact that the modern state is experiencing a crisis is easy to observe by the number of authoritarian
governments that grows all over the planet, especially in the West and the Americas, until a few years ago, a nationalist discourse in the United States of America and the return of some authoritarian governments in Latin America.
Education for democracy and for humanism has failed in modernity, as Peter Sloterdijk noted in Rules for the Human Park, which is nothing more than an answer (dialogue is good to be true) of Heidegger’s Letters on Humanism, where he asks : “What domesticates man if in all previous experiences with the education of mankind remained obscure who or what educates educators and for what? Or is it that the question of the care and training of the human being is no longer formulated in a pertinent way in the field of mere theories of domestication and education? “(Sloterdijk 2000).
Modern education is to the rights and duties of the state, even if the name has been erased, the famous “moral and civic education,” where civism and morality are referred to the state. In biblical logic, where agapic love is fundamental and not always easily understood by theological culture, especially when there is social and political polarization.
It is fundamental that relationships are established and that they have respect for the opinion and action of others, and this is faced with the maxim: “do not do to the other what you do not want done to you,” the so-called golden rule.
It is common to use the discourse of the other, for the lack of thought, it is not about plagiarism, only the use of maxims rather than something elaborate, as soon as something becomes evident. soon there are those who adopt the slogans, without always adopting the actions, but Jesus says to the disciples to those who used his name Mk 9: 39-40: “Do not prohibit it, for no one performs miracles in my name and then speaks ill of me. Whoever is not against us is in our favor.”
This should be the paraconsistent logic of dialogue, never the exclusivist logic: “who is not with us is against us”, but this logic has penetrated politics and society, so the speeches are becoming more authoritarian and more exclusive to those who do not according to a given flag.
What is illogical in any logical system is to consider the logic of hatred to be inclusive, humanism has not ended, a humanism that preaches the logic of state power has ended.
Sloterdijk, Peter. Regras para o parque humano (brazilian edition, Rules for the human park – a response to Heidegger’s letter on humanism). Trad. José Oscar de A. Marques. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2000
From Logic to Being
27
Sep
The concept of antropotécnica, initially controversial that came to shake the German culture
and generated a controversy between Junger Haberrmas and Peter Sloterdijk, even being compared to conservative forces, in fact can be related so much to “improvement of the world” (in German Weltverbesserung) and “self-improvement” (Selbstverbesserung).
It surpasses and at the same time dialogues with the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics, it still shows a difficulty in the relation between subject and power, in spite of its Microphysics of Power, thus sees the relation with the technique: “I have tried, rather, to produce a history of the different modes of subjectivation of the human being in our culture: I have treated, in this perspective, the three modes of objectification that transform human beings into subjects. […]. It is not, therefore, the power, but the subject that constitutes the general theme of my research. “(FOUCAULT, 2014, pp. 118-119).
Although biopolitics appears to be an overcoming of the “technology of the self” (the aesthetics of existence), it has not dissociated itself from the object x subject polarity, whose essence is idealistic logic.
If biopolitics is ultimately the rule of life, life is beyond the relation to power, for a radical change took place in Modernity: technique. Sloterdijk’s 2009 work “You Must Change Your Life” (Du musst dein Leven ändern) he establishes two forms of artificial (not virtual) production of human behavior in so-called “great cultures” under the impact of the Modern Age.
The first is the production of man by man, what he calls “letting operate” (Sich-operieren-Lassen) and the second is the production of men, but of themselves, which would then go to techniques of “self -employment” (Sloterdik, 2009, page 589).
What Sloterdijk wants to point out to us is that there is a new form of relationship with the state in progress that goes beyond biopolitics, clarifies in his foundational work “Rules for the human park” that since Plato, creator of the ideal state and the idea of citizenship where the philosopher-politician was superior, let us see: “What Plato utters by the mouth of his stranger is the program of a humanist society embodied in the figure of the one complete humanist: the master of the science of royal grazing.
The task of this superhumanist [the political philosopher trained for this] would be no other than the planning of properties in an elite [of politicians] that would have to be explicitly raised for the good of all. “(Sloterdijk 2001, 82- 83).
This logic escapes from the left-right dualism, liberators and oppressors (they are on both sides), for a logic of redefining the role of state and politics, is a paraconsistent logic, in the sense that it requires a new language, a broad dialogue.
The Peruvian philosopher Francisco Miró Quesada, who coined the word Paraconsistent, says that Latin American thought is born: “before all, naked and weak, like a helpless orphan,” amidst dictatorial possibilities a new thought can open us to Being .
SLOTERDIJK, P. Regras para o parque humano (Rules for the Human Park). São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2001.
FOUCAULT, M. O sujeito e o poder. (The subject and the power). In: Foucault, M. Dictations and Writings – IX. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 2014.
There is Latin American thought
26
Sep
Yes, it is evident that it exists, but as a school of philosophy it is still linked to various
forms of exogenous thoughts that, in adapting to our reality, remain vague.
I consider Meró Quesada, along with Mario de Andrade (about Macunaíma mainly) and Sergio Buarque de Holanda (Roots of Brazil mainly) those who possess something genuine. There is an entire affiliation to the left of Eduardo Galeano, Argentine Nestor Canclini, and others less read: Manuel Ugarte (Argentina), José Martí (Cuba) and Manoel Bomfim (Brasil).
Of course the brave thinkers of the left like Florestan Fernandes and Caio Prado, anarchist thinkers like Bento Prado, and conservative thinkers like Olavo de Carvalho and the forgotten Mário Ferreira dos Santos, and the not always valued Milton Santos.
I like the didactic division of Quesada, saying that Latin American philosophy was born in the late nineteenth century, fighting positivism (how many people have not yet left), but still linked with a European instrument.
The second, which he called “forgives” and “patriarchs”, but which he intelligently divides into regional and universal, solving this, which did the work of recovering languages and sources giving colors to Latin American thought.
The third generation, curiously is also the period of Mário de Andrade and Sergio Buarque de Holanda, raise the question if possible a specificity of Latin American thought, this founded the group Hiperión.
Miró Quesada defined himself as a nostalgic atheist and then adopted a type of pantheism, which I think is very present in the Latin American cosmogony. His first published work was “Sense of the phenomenological movement” (1941), and as we said in the previous post, he coined the term Paraconsistent Logic in 1976.
There were remarkable encounters, there is record of this, with Mother Teresa of Calcutta and Kurt Gödel. Its main influences are the philosophers Jose Ortega y Gasset and Leopoldo Zea, the fact that there are strong ties the first generation, that is the criticism to positivism is a delay.
Between purity and brotherhood
31
Aug
Most everyday religious thinking is that we are immersed in a culture of impurity, of things
that are not healthy, this led to what Peter Sloterdijk calls immunology, the idea that we should separate ourselves from everything that is “impure.”
But this concept can be extended to ethnicities, xenophobic cultures, endogeny, worship to a specific form of gender, among many others, also religious.
Perhaps the greatest impurity of our time, is precisely to consider the Other impure, or unworthy, or inferior or any form of exclusion, which is nothing more than refusing to leave our “sphere”, our security, a fundamental part of this reasoning is the distrust.
The fact that someone thinks differently should not be a reason, to consider the Other’s thought and way of life as something dangerous or even harmful to our “culture”, is something new, curious that we should be interested in and try to understand its way of to live, which is their “sphere.”
In biblical terms, this was what Evangelist Mark wrote in Chapter 7, 14-23, in showing the Master’s vision of what makes men impure indeed: “Listen, all of you, and understand: what makes a man unclean it is what comes into it from without, but what comes out from within. For it is from within the human heart that evil intentions, immorality, robberies, murders, adulteries, outbursts of ambition, malice, fraud, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, lack of judgment come out. All these evil things come out from within, and it is they that make man unclean. ”
It is easy to understand how much of the “spherical” reasoning is present in various protection rings, it is the virtual walls that we erect around us and seem to provide security.
that are not healthy, this led to what Peter Sloterdijk calls immunology, the idea that we should separate ourselves from everything that is “impure.”But this concept can be extended to ethnicities, xenophobic cultures, endogeny, worship to a specific form of gender, among many others, also religious.
Perhaps the greatest impurity of our time, is precisely to consider the Other impure, or unworthy, or inferior or any form of exclusion, which is nothing more than refusing to leave our “sphere”, our security, a fundamental part of this reasoning is the distrust.
The fact that someone thinks differently should not be a reason, to consider the Other’s thought and way of life as something dangerous or even harmful to our “culture”, is something new, curious that we should be interested in and try to understand its way of to live, which is their “sphere.”
In biblical terms, this was what Evangelist Mark wrote in Chapter 7, 14-23, in showing the Master’s vision of what makes men impure indeed: “Listen, all of you, and understand: what makes a man unclean it is what comes into it from without, but what comes out from within. For it is from within the human heart that evil intentions, immorality, robberies, murders, adulteries, outbursts of ambition, malice, fraud, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, lack of judgment come out. All these evil things come out from within, and it is they that make man unclean. ”
It is easy to understand how much of the “spherical” reasoning is present in various protection rings, it is the virtual walls that we erect around us and seem to provide security.
The human zoo and antropotécnica
30
Aug
At a conference held on July 17, 1999, dedicated to Heidegger and Lévinas, at the castle of Elmau in
Bavaria, the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk addressed controversial issues such as genetic manipulation and launched the idea of an “anthropotech”, provoking strong reactions in Germany and also in Brazil in the space Mais+ of the Folha de São Paulo daily “The new zoo of the man” was cover featured on October 10, 1999.
The philosopher’s ideas had already been presented in a Swiss city of Basel, but now the reaction was the relationship of humanism with the media, a more mediatic interpretation of humanism, which provoked the reaction of the philosopher Habermas and a columnist of the prestigious magazine German Der Spiegel, where a controversy began with the writer Thomas Assheuer who indicated that Sloterdijk “propagates prenatal selection and optional birth: genetic technique as an applied social critic .. traces of fascist rhetoric” was published in the prestigious journal.
On 9 September of the same year Sloterdijk published in Die Zeit, two open letters one addressed to Assheuer and another to Mohr, who attacked him as well, but stating that the mentor of these attacks was Jürgen Habermas, and even more provocatively entitled his article of “Die Kritische Theorie ist tot”, translating The critical theory is dead. The controversy grew and the articles by Manfred Frank and Ernst Tungendhat published on September 27 in Spiegel, made a dossier of Sloterdijk’s book of Sloterdijk.
The Rules for the Human Park was already a book, with a cover in the style of Arno Breker, sculptor of the III Reich, grouping icons of Hitler, Nietzsche and the Superman of the comics, the sheep Dolly and Lara Croft, a heroine of virtual games of computer, the controversy was formed. Sloterdijk’s point of departure was not this, I confess it was my reaction at first reading too.
But his starting point this book was, and his presence at the colloquium dedicated to Heidegger and Lévinas prove this, a phrase of the poet Jean-Paul at the beginning of the book: “books are letters addressed to friends, only longer”, a humanism linked to writing.
Also the reference to Cicero’s humanitas, an opposition to the savagery and brutalities that were the spectacles in the human amphitheater, shows, unlike his detractors, the preoccupation with a current pre-fascism (read yesterday’s post), which was drawing and is now a reality in many parts of the world, and we remember that the “national humanism” of the nineteenth century was precisely where the two world wars of the twentieth century were designed.
What led Heidegger to ask in his Letter on Humanism, and Sloterdijk’s book is a response, if a blind manifestation of anthropocentrism led to three conceptions of tragic confrontations of the twentieth century: “Bolshevism, Fascism and Americanism,” in his reply Sloterdijk affirms that Christianity, Marxism and existentialism were the three humanist alternatives that “avoid the ultimate radicality of the question about the human being” (Sloterdijk 1999: 23).
The separation of man from nature, and the animal which in Heidegger’s view is not + and rationality, in Sloterdijk’s image, Heidegger walks among them like an angry angel in his sword of fire (idem, 25), marking the ontological cleavage between the being of biology and man as the clearing of Being, for whom the Self presents itself as a Being that chooses for its guard, in its search for the “pacification” that two world wars have buried, and now they seem to be on the near horizon now.
Why it is important to read Sloterdijk
29
Aug
I informed in the last post that besides the spheres of Sloterdijk, I have my own sphere, 
borrowed from Teilhard Chardin: the Noosphere. I read Sloterdijk´s Spheres only I that was published in Portuguese, of the others I have comments of the own author and of his readers and interpreters,
An answer I read recently from an interview with him gave me an important synthesis of my closeness to his thinking, when asked about what he expected from the academic world, he said ceremonially, “From the 19th century onwards (let’s think of Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche), the world of philosophers is divided between those who, like me, seek an alliance with the media of their time (at that time, literature, today the press, radio and television), and those who do not do it, betting on the classic link between university and book publishers as their only cognitive biotope, “among many things I read, this is the coolest.
I do not bet on the media of social networks, blogs like the one I write to ten years, by fad or affirmation of my thinking, but because I think it is important to dialogue with what is now media, I refused some time, for example, to Twitter who is impulsive and angry.
Another point of contact is his view of the comfort zone, in the same interview published in the Folha São Paulo 2003 space Mais+, but which I randomly found on a website to re-read what influenced me at the time, which made me soon buy the book : Rules for the Human Park, published by brazilian Estação Liberdade, at the turn of the millennium, but soon stopped reading.
I only came back years later alerted by a student to the importance of his thinking.
This point of security, therefore, is not a zone of comfort, explains: “We are thinking how the human being architect the security of its existence. How does he live? How do you prevent future eventualities and catastrophes? How do you defend yourself? How do you integrate into your cultures, understood as communities of struggle? It is a paradigm shift: from philosophy to a general immunology, “that is, we seek a” place “to be sure, there is an analytic of the place, I would say in my analysis, in direct opposition to nihilistic and Kantian pragmatism.
A preview of Sloterdijk can not fail to be noticed in this interview, when predicting fascism in the USA: “From the point of view of media theory, fascism is monothematism in power. If a public opinion is structured in such a way that uniformity increases too much, we have a pre-fascist symptom, “there are several points on the planet with this symptom, and of course we can plunge into a new pre-war fascist era.
We can not fail to see this in positions in Latin America, and in Brazil in particular.
Ignorance in times of wrath
09
Aug
Social and political radicalization, reopening racial, ideological, and religious polemics, has led to the
limits of anger and hatred that can open insurmountable gaps, but anger leads to more ignorance and greater chasms, promises of paradises, and delivering personal and social hells.
This is scientific, the Psychology magazine Intelligence has just published a survey that says that angry people tend to think they are smarter than they really are, anger different from other negative feelings, is related to an illusion of “positive intelligence “Which causes these people to overestimate their mental capacities, think that” others own the truth, “when the hermeneutic truth arises from dialogue.
Previous research has already shown that anger is an unusual negative emotion, as it is often associated with positive traits, and although research does not state this, we can find in all kinds of fanaticism, that enclosed in “bubbles” reinforce the thoughts of conviction in general dogma, and develop a kind of “affirmative” neurosis.
Philosophers and thinkers such as Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Byung-Chul Han had already emphasized the importance of negative, counterpoint, contradictory legal case, absolute truths and absolutisms of evil or good, create “ontologies impera”, a category created by Peter Sloterdijk to explain the contemporary being.
Neurosis develops in a pseudo-creativity in which the same truth seeks to be expressed in a “more contemporary” way when in fact it does not abandon dogmas, fundamentalisms and fanaticisms of all kinds.
The remedy is listening, the search for common sense, and often the only possible response to the angry is silence, of course there are positive cases of outbursts of indignation and repulsion of unjust or immoral acts, but surely a fair person seeks to hear the ” negative “to make sure you’re on the right side.
The Geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence
06
Aug
Due to overzealousness with distortions of technology use, a delayed entry into the educational
and entrepreneurial sectors, some countries and industrialized nations begin to lose the foot of the technological race.
This has become more serious in the last two years, when technologies related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) have become emerging.
Some authors speak of the fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0, where the issue is no longer the simple digital automation of existing jobs, but the total transformation of the model into digital, this means creating models of production, business, innovation and technological convergence in order to allow mass data processing and machine learning, this frightens by the social implications, but can not cause paralysis.
An emergency field that can help job creation is the “collaborative economy,” where Wikipedia and Uber are clearer examples, but there are many others. In the field of geopolitics it is easy to understand why the United States and China are winning this battle with ease, in addition to the economic and school structure for this, their transnational corporations in Europe, Russia and many other countries guarantee sustainable development and insertion in the market, but the the main issue is the non-negative criticism of the use of technologies and the understanding of the social aspects of this option.
A report by the Ecuadorian-British journalist Sally Burch, in the magazine América Latina en Movimento: integración en tempos de incertidumbre, 07-2018, shows the still incipient movement of this scenario in Latin America, without a serious political scenario.
