Arquivo para a ‘’ Categoria
The struggle of good against evil, weaknesses of good
15
Jul
The evil in Augustine of Hippo in book VII of the Confessions, is the absence of
good, just as the entire universe is ordered, although now we discover a universe with energy and dark mass, black holes, semi-new and galaxies disappearing and appearing, and many laws new in astrophysics, even so, there is a hierarchy, where some things stand out from others, and that is what Augustine drew attention to, and there was already in Augustine the question of free will.
But a tough lesson even for religious like Augustine, who abandoned the Manichean philosophy, is the struggle between good and evil, and this still dominates part of the philosophical dualism, where being inferior is not being evil, there are inferior good things and things more superiors, so the important thing is the loss of sense of what is good or bad, what Hanna Arendt called “The banality of evil” (Companhia das Letras, 1999), so someone can do something “inferior” without being “evil ”.
Those who want to give life pure delight, or who claim that it makes sense in a life well lived if we are “productive” and “active”, inspired by myths like a superior IQ or fortuitous inheritance, fortune in the Greek sense is different, even if this is done by oppressive means, where arguably the racial argument is the most disgusting of all, but where do these myths come from.
One of the great myths that has arisen since antiquity is Odyssey of Odyssey and Iliad (chants VIII of Odyssey and IX of Iliad), which means a symbol of man’s ability to overcome adversity, although there is the character Odysseus (the Greek name of Ulysses), would be born in Ithaca, son of King Laerte, who reigned in Anticléia.
Although James Joyce’s Ulysses, written from 1914 to 1921, speaks of a character Leopold Blum, considered by the author to be a modern man who is both strong and weak, cautious and rash, hero and coward, in an attempt to create a human being representative of humanity, however, is actually the modern lonely hero, an exquisite Don Quixote.
The contextualization of the Greek epic hero and the modern “hero” are, however, different, so to read Ulysses by Joyce it is necessary almost a script, which even some were made.
It was the psychologist Carl Yung who called attention to the “monologue” aspect of Joyce’s Ulysses, although he looks like an “ordinary” man, he is a single man and his “struggle”, warned Yung: “What is so scary about Ulysses it is the fact that, behind a thousand veils, nothing is hidden; of being neither turned to the mind nor to the world, but, as cold as the moon seen from the cosmic space, allows the drama of growth, being and decay to take its course ”, this is the modern myth.
The heroes who appeared in the pandemic are not heroes of “war” or immortal myths, they are not immune to the pandemic themselves and live with fear, and even family isolation, what they should think about is the life worth living. for everyone, for the planet and for health.
JUNG, Carl Gustav. Ulysses: A Monologue, UK: Haskel House, 1977.
Looking without seeing, listening without understanding
10
Jul
The rush, the hectic life, the anxiety made us insensitive on a daily basis, on
the social plane the stubborn reigns, where the third party has no time, follows the logic of Truth and False, which is valid for the world of digital equipment, but it shouldn’t be in the logic of human thought.
The third included by Barsarab and Stefan Lupascu, is also in the quantum principles and is gradually reaching digital physical devices (now quantum), and some advanced teleportation experiments have been carried out (see the article), which expands the concept to space , one can go from A to B, without going through the third intermediary, which introduces the discontinuity.
But the social, human and political logic remains binary, Manichean and gradually leads to a confrontation at a time when social forces should unite for the common enemy that is the virus and the consequences that it will bring socially, we remember that the Spanish flu followed both wars, despite countless warnings from wise thinkers and philosophers, to mystics.
As Morin says (see the lecture) it seems that we are walking like somnambulists in the dark, the process that could correspond to global solidarity is going the other way around, we want to include but exclude, we love only equals, knowledge has become obscure.
The biblical words follow, as it is in Isaiah (6: 9): “You will hear, without understanding, you will look, without seeing … because the heart of this people has become desensitized”, and even in times of world difficulties it seems that folly endures.
Evangelist Matthew says of his time, but it also serves for the present moment (Mt 13: 16-17) “Happy are you, because your eyes see and your ears hear. Truly I tell you, many prophets and the righteous wished to see what you see, and did not see, wished to hear what you hear, and did not hear ”, but you can still open your ears and change the route.
It is a time of deeper awareness for those who want change, and to listen more attentively to the signs of the times for those who believe and know the kingdom of God on earth will come.
The veiling of knowledge, night of thought ’
09
Jul
Arrábida’s Charter of Transdisciplinarity, written by the physicist Nicolescu Barsarabi,
the Portuguese serigraphist Lima de Freitas and Edgar Morin, points out the process (prior to the Web), where excessive specialization and an impoverishment of Being created a veiling of thought, says the letter :
“… The contemporary rupture between an increasingly accumulative knowledge and an increasingly impoverished inner being leads to the rise of a new obscurantism, whose consequences on the individual and social level are incalculable.” (Arrábida, Portugal, 1994).
The problem then is how to create a knowledge that unites and a worldview that expands the impoverished and brutish human spirit, according to Morin’s own recipe: “it is necessary to replace a thought that isolates and separates with a thought that distinguishes and unites”.
All polarization and barriers between different thoughts are the root where dialogue is ignored, even if sometimes stated, the semantic closure of thought, whatever the principles and often moral, religious and even cultural are important, must exceed the pre-conceptions (in sense of Gadamer) and meet the positive in the Other.
The Letter of Arrábida says in article 14: “The opening involves the acceptance of ignorance, the unexpected and the unpredictable. Tolerance is the recognition of the right to ideas and truths contrary to ours ”, this is the meaning of replacing a thought“ that isolates and separates ”with another that“ distinguishes and unites ”, having a difference does not mean isolating or even separating.
It is the totalitarian idea of the single truth, even if religious, pragmatic or scientific, that often isolates and does not unite, in grounded dialogues there are always new elements to be considered and rarely are they properly heard and respected.
Physicist Barsarab Nicolescu, one of the signatories to the Arrábida Charter, in his own Charter of Transdisciplinarity, regarding quantum physics wrote: “… where does this blindness come from? Where does this perpetual desire to do the new with the old come from? The irreducible novelty of quantum vision continues to belong to a small elite of leading scientists ”, although the physical reality proves and surprises it.
Barsarab said in that his Manifest about “reality”, “In our century, Husserl and some other researchers, in an effort to question the foundations of science, discovered the existence of different levels of perception of Reality by the observing subject”, more than that the observer is part of the experiment, of the whole, and is not neutral.
All of our logic and actions are based on three axioms: The axiom of identity: A is A, The axiom of non-contradiction: A is not non-A; and the third is called the axiom of the excluded third: there is no third term T (T for “included third”) that is both A and non-A.
What Nicolescu says is what would happen if we became the included third, that’s what Stefan Lupascu (1900-1988) did when creating the logic of the included third (tertium non datur), including the T-state that is neither “current” nor “potential”, they replace the classic logic of “true” or “false”, and create a more generalized level that includes physics, epistemology and what is “consciousness”.
NICOLESCU, Barsarab. Transdisciplinarity and Complexity : Levels of Reality as Source of Indeterminacy. Available in: https://ciret-transdisciplinarity.org/bulletin/b15c4.php access: July 2020.
Tribute to Edgar Morin, 99 years old
08
Jul
July 8, 2020 Edgar Morin turns 99 years, with an impressive lucidity, recently
described the current pandemic as: “We have to learn to accept them and live with them, while our civilization has installed in us the need for certainties each time bigger about the future, often illusory, sometimes frivolous ”, the same frivolity that Peter Sloterdijk states:“ In this frivolous sphere, we thought we were able to control nature with sophisticated technology, but the virus brought us to our knees. Will our way of being in the world change?”.
Of Sephardic Jewish origin (Jews who settled in the Iberian peninsula), with the original name of Edgar Nahoum, was born on July 8, 1921 in Paris, his father Vidal Nahoum was a merchant from Salonica (the former Thessalonica), and his mother Luna Beressi, passed away when she was 10 years old, adopted the code name Morin during the French resistance struggle and remained.
In 1978 she married Edwige Lannegrace, to whom she dedicated the book Edwige, the Inseparable (2009), after her death in 2008, about him, she said a sentence by Montaigne: “It was him, it was me”.
He is currently married to the 61-year-old Moroccan sociologist Sabah Abouessalam.
He wrote 1956, Le Cinéma or l´Homme Imaginaire, Minuit, Paris. In Portuguese: Cinema or the Imaginary Man. Lisbon: Relógio d’Água Editores, 1997, had previously written Year Zero of Germany (1946) and Man and Death (1951).
Among other books, the second book of great impact is The Lost Paradigm – for a new Anthropology, Zahar, Brazil, 1979. (French edition of 1973).
But his great work will be the six volumes of Method 1, the first “The nature of nature” publishing in 1977, the second of Method 2, “The life of life” (1980), Method 3 “The knowledge of knowledge” ( 1986), Method 4 “Ideas: habitat, life, customs and organization” (1991), Method 5 – humanity of humanity: human identity (2001) and Method 6: Ethics (2004), the years adopted are from the original French editions.
In total he published more than 30 books, in 1983 he held a debate in Lisbon where he put “The epistemological problem of complexity” which became a book in 1985 published by the publisher Europa América Portuguese.
His central ideas in addition to the problem of complexity are the return to the human (which is called the lost paradigm), the transdisciplinary thought present in almost all of his work and was a signatory of the Letter of Transdisciplinarity of Arrábida by the serigraphist painter Lima de Freitas, for him, the physicist Nicolescu Barsarabi, written in 15 synthetic articles, where we highlight:
“ … singly accumulative knowledge and an increasingly impoverished inner being leads to the rise of new obscurantism, whose consequences on the individual and social level are incalculable.” (Arrábida, Portugal, 1994).
In 1985 he wrote “The epistemological problem of complexity” (Europa America, 1985), which was conceived from a debate held in Lisbon, in December 1983.
The essence of his thinking about complexity can be thought of in three new concepts, among them: the dialogical operator (understood differently from the dialectic operator), the recursive operator (which means to understand the consequences of the acts, in a continuous cause-effect relationship because the effect produces a new cause) and the holographic operator (the part is in the whole and the whole is in the part, so do not separate the part from the whole).
So we must unite separate things, namely: reason and emotion, sensitive and intelligible, real and imaginary, reason and myths, and, science and art, another essential thing is to consider that we are 100% nature and 100% culture, the old nature paradigm X culture that philosophy asks about what we are, from contractualists, through evolutionists to socio-Marxists (wrote My left), Morin answers in a new way (from Pena-Veiga: The ecological awakening: Edgar Morin and ecology complex).
He has many questions about our future, the following lecture explains this dramatic moment, that the pandemic can demonstrate that this is how we should perceive it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3t7UFTpDHE
Knowledge needed for the future
07
Jul
It was Edgar Morin who found the masterful way or veil over knowledge, its
errors and illusions, to interrupt knowledge in its principles, which is expanded in another book that talks about “global flavors and local flavors: the transdisciplinary look” (2008) .
“The seven knowledge necessary for the education of the future” (Morin, 1999) affirms this paradox that in search of knowledge embedded in illusions and errors, it affirms in the first chapter, while no second presents a gap that knowledge teaches is “not pertinent” to the student, that is, the fact that he shows within a disciplinary process that should be displayed as a whole.
The third saber is to indicate human identity, to comment on the part is curious and to speak so much about identity without mentioning the social complex in which we live as a “species” that must identify as such (from identity), perhaps the great paradigm of humanism , today in question.
This will send in chapter 4, which is the earthly identity, which lies in the importance of understanding that the disciplines (areas of specialties) must converge to a human condition, and it leads to human understanding, once in school it should be used as “ understand each other ”.
The fifth saber refers to dealing with uncertainties, students can consider a great paradox when dealing with mysteries, since a school school only dedicates to dealing with conceptual and scientific certainties, and life is always a surprise.
The sixth (and 6th. Saber) chapter involves understanding, which comes from the earthly condition, the globalization process that started with the colonization of America in the 16th century and had complex consequences (ideological, economic, social, etc.) and this must be taking us to a planetary condition.
The seventh chapter involves the ethics of mankind, he names it as an anthropo-ethics (Sloterdijk goes further and says an anthropotechnique is necessary, but falls outside this scope), the importance of citizenship in society (in Homeland-Earth goes beyond and proposes citizenship planetary) where a social conscience is needed.
Tomorrow he will be 99 years old and we are thinking of a special post for this lucid educator and thinker.
MORIN, E. (1999) Seven complex lessons in education for the future. UNESCO Pub. Available PDF.
http://www.ideassonline.org/public/pdf/Sevencomplexlessonsineducation.pdf
Trinitarian forgetfulness and ontological resumption
29
May
The idea of an absolute, infinite, unique and eternal spiritual substance (see the post)
far from being an idea of God, far from being the unveiling of the Holy Trinity, is an idealistic scheme of rationality for an abstract God, yet compatible with the Hegelianism, the idealistic god.
Sloterdijk’s severe criticism of humanism now makes even more sense with the post-pandemic perspectives, placing the “will to power” of the two wars and a possible future scenario, as “a synthesis of humanism and bestialism” (Sloterdijk, 2000) , of course we have other possibilities, the varied ideological thesis that many expect or a third excluded: the fraternal option planetary.
Just as the ontological resumption proposed a new logic and epistemology, which comes from the Husserlian epoché (put all concepts in parentheses), along with a new theology, this Trinitarian, where there is a third person in the Trinity, which is the Holy Spirit, but it is not simple.
Christian and Catholic theologian Karl Kahner wrote about “Trinitarian oblivion” (1962), even before the Second Vatican Council, which marked a turning point in Catholic thought, the first ecumenical council that generated some controversy and which is not yet fully applied,
The Second Vatican Council marked a profound change in the relationship of the church with society, it should open a new perspective of the participation of the popular (of the laity), a new vision of the mission of the church and in special presentation of the updating and insertion of the church in its time. with various liturgical and pastoral aspects.
Many Christians in general understand the Father and the Son well, but the Holy Spirit is a mystery, not a synthesis and not only the relationship with God the Father (the One that no one has seen) and neither the Jesus, the incarnate God alive, historical, but without leave divine.
Classical theology treated the “mystery” of the Trinity with the idea of an “absolute, infinite, unique and eternal spiritual substance”, see the previous post of Hegelianism, so God is a single substance, essence or nature, explained as three sub- distinct systems and people: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in these ideas the Hegelian system (among them even the Marxist) fit well.
The understanding of Being as an act and potency (typical of Tomás de Aquino), and potency is similar to the virtual, places divine people as a relationship and is integrated in a new synthesis that sees God as a pericoretic communion* of love, theologians of different tendencies as von Balthasar, Rahner and Kasper moved in this direction and the ontological issue is a common one. (*more that relationship, inter-pretenetration)
The second Vatican Council already reflected the turning of a metaphysical perspective of a theology that prioritizes a more historical, phenomenological, hermeneutic and existential understanding of reality, more in tune with the current worldview and culture.
The understanding of being as an act (so characteristic of Aquinate) and of divine persons as a relationship, are part of a new synthesis that understands God as a pericoretic communion of love.
The understanding on the other hand of potency as virtus, virtuous possibility of Love that is essential to understand that sin is non-love and not a mere Manichean opposition from evil.
What is Hegelians spirit and transcendence
27
May
We have already made several posts to explain that Kant’s transcendence is
nothing more than the separation of subjects and objects, but Hegel completes and systematizes this whole philosophy in Phenomenology of the Spirit, a work that deeply influenced the philosophies of law, history, aesthetics and of religion, Marx himself and many currents that flow from it have not escaped this.
We have also made posts on the question of Gadamer’s historical conscience, criticizing Dilthey’s main ideas about history, now let’s analyze the “spirit” in Hegel.
First, as the name says, it is a phenomenology, therefore not a set of facts or even tangible realities, but a set of phenomena placed under a certain scheme.
Hegel understands history, art, religion and philosophy itself as an objective phenomenon, and as such (this is an object) is directed to the spirit for self-knowledge.
His capacity for synthesis will make his history of philosophy, with specific schemes and elements about transcendence and metaphysics in philosophy, give strength to his thinking, and the Phenomenology of the Spirit is central to his scheme.
To understand what he thought as a phenomenon, it is necessary to understand what he calls “natural conscience” which was what opened the way for philosophical knowledge, and it is through it that he will make a reading of the history of philosophy and thus elaborate what it is knowledge.
Just to make a counterpoint, Husserl will say instead that there is only awareness of “something”, while Hegel constructs this category as being “natural” and there is objectivity.
But Hegel’s “natural” is not only natural, but historical, therefore, its introduction to a system of philosophy, is built on the historical path of thought, it seems “natural” but it is not, its is philosophy of history.
What is hidden behind this scheme is what Nietzsche will call the genealogy of morals, but then other genealogies arose, the linguistic turn from Wittgenstein for example, he will see objects in relation to others: “we cannot think of no object outside the possibility of its connection with others” (Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 2.0121).
To understand what is Spirit in Hegel, and which profoundly influences the conceptions of arts, history and religion today, the forms are correlated to an idea of absolute subjectivity, therefore “outside” the object, and related to it by a special type of essential logic that leads to the knowledge of reality, therefore it is not a phenomenological realism as Husserl sees it.
The spiritual and transcendent in Hegel is “the most interior, from which the whole construction of the spiritual world ascends”, it was what Marx called “heaven for earth” and that he (Marx) reversed, however, the separation of subject and object remains, so spiritual is a type of Absolute Spirit of Religion (see diagram).
The post-pandemic and spirituality
26
May
The life of exercises that led us to the “Society of Burnout” (Byung Chul Han)
despite the pandemic and quarantine in many places has not stopped, accustomed to the frenetic pace of modern society, continues behind the action, the agitation and the fill the void with nothing.
In a hurry there are already those who predict a more closed society in frontiers, strengthening nationalism and protectionism in business, those who proclaim a “new world order” (a new conspiracy theory) and those who are always ready to defend ideologies: it is our turn .
However, just as the pandemic nobody predicted what will come is out of the great theories and a novelty will be a search for refuge in forces beyond the human to support the new and real news that have already happened: greater recollection at home and time for inspiration and contemplation, a poorer or at least more austere life, and new forms of living together.
Those apocalyptic of the network society, have rediscovered the new media, but due to the delay the use is still irregular and more curious than fruitful, but with time it will mature, there is a gap without doubt that is online education and little thought and if planned on this.
However, one thing has already changed, something we did with our “free time”, cooking the house, sharing daily tasks, looking with new eyes at people close to us and for many a new look at nature and our own nature: the complex human phenomenon.
If we made great theories of dialogue, now we have to practice it or we will be stuck in our closest relationships, because when we leave them we face a different and unthinking Other.
Those who survived the pandemic, and it may even return, Spain and China present new worrying cases, will require a new lesson from each and from society: rethink everything that has been the foundations of our lives, including the religious, we can wake up or not.
To those convinced of the near future, I remember that they did not foresee the pandemic, perhaps a war or a prophecy, or an irrevocable historical path, an invisible and unknown virus shook life
Between the essence and the Being
21
May
Although dualism remains present, the essence is conceived by analogy to
Being, and this was also the Thomist doctrine, it remained an onto-theology until the 20th century, it took a whole path of phenomenology to encounter the Other, the non – Being not as a contradiction, and the end of the dualism between Being and essence.
The long discussion of the medieval period between realists and nominalists was based on a term now unknown which was quididade, which means that thing is, from Greek hylé to modern models of Heidegger’s metaphysics, where the thing that can be material or not, and also what we think about it, in Husserl’s line there is only awareness of something, or of the thing.
But there was a philosopher in the Middle Ages, Duns Scotto (1266-1308) who did not distinguish between the thing that exists (si est) and what it is (quid est), and theologically it was complicated because the thesis of Santo Tomás de Aquino it was by analogy, that is, the meaning of similarity between things or facts (Houaiss dictionary, 2009, p. 117), and the religious were always in a hurry because in the 20th century Duns Scotto was accepted within the Catholic Christian doctrine, becoming blessed (John Paul II declared it).
His theory of knowledge used the two known distinctions distinctio realis (real distinction) and exists between two beings of nature, and the distinction rationalis (distinction of reason) that occurs between two beings, but in the mind of the subject who knows, but breaks dualism in creating a third possibility to distinctio formalis (formal distinction) that occurs in the perceived entity and is neither real nor in the mind.
So in addition to his disciple William de Ockham, famous for the simplification principle called Ockham’s Razor, but in a way Descartes, Leibniz, Hobbes and Kant had their influence.
However, the recovery of Duns Scotto is essential to overcome the dualism of nominalism / realism and the overcoming of pure realism by philosophical hermeneutics, and thus also the modern correspondent of nominalism, which is the linguistic turn, makes sense and opens up dialogue.
Phenomenology and historical hermeneutics
20
May
Any reading, however simple or complex, involves an interpretation, and in
whatever culture the interpreter is based on language, especially writing for people who have gone beyond oral language, so we speak of text interpretation.
It is clear that the imaginary and the different languages, for example, now the media, have a differentiating influence, however they will still be based on that primary schooling of the different interpretants and it is still in the primary school the interpretation of texts.
We already said in the previous post that it starts with Socrates’ maieutics (act of giving ideas), not by chance the birth of the school as we know it today, then came the Platonic academic and the Aristotelian high school, the long period called “translatio studiorum” from the low and high middle ages, until reaching the Gutenberg press and the modern school, linked to modern enlightenment.
Contemporary hermeneutics, whose starting point for several authors is Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was contemporary with Hegel, but with direct influence from Kant and Fichte, he did not opt for idealistic subjectivism, and as a Lutheran religious he also escaped from Catholic orthodoxy
However, hermeneutics will find another soil in Franz Brentano, which until breaking with the Catholic scholastic vision (he was even a cleric), in 1871, he reinterprets the scholastic-Aristotelian intentionality “the intentional in-existence” (the reference is of Safranski) distinguishing two modes of being: the esse naturale, natural or real being located outside the subject who perceives it, and the esse intentionale, the mental or intentional being of the objects that exist immanent to the subject who knows it.
This philosophical digression is important to understand that in Franz Brentano and later in Husserl, hermeneutics has undergone a profound change, preserving its ontological root, thus maintaining the relationship to a content, but delves into the mental or psychological issue.
Husserl, a student of Franz Brentano, will cause another change in hermeneutics now towards the epistemological crisis of science in the mid-early 20th century, Husserl responds with a rupture to the Kantian dualism between the object and the knowing subject, with a question: “I exist , therefore, all the “no me” is a simple phenomenon and dissolves into phenomenal nexuses? ” (HUSSERL, 1992, p. 43).
The evolution of this thought will pass through Heidegger, a student of Husserl, who in Being and Time (1986), explaining that these elaborations since Plato and Aristotle were tied to natural phenomena: “The dominant representation in the West of the totality of nature (the world) it was, until the 17th century, determined by Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy … ”(page 86) and that now the question of Being should be taken up again, it is thus a big step in philosophical hermeneutics.
The maturity of this thought, elaborating the method of the hermeneutic circle is developed by Gadamer, for those who interpret “… it is not to take notice of what has been understood, but to elaborate possibilities projected in the understanding”, it is thus an opening in the preconceptions.
References
GADAMER, H.-G. (1989) Verdade e Método. Petrópolis (Brazil): Editora Vozes.
HEIDEGGER, M. (1986) Ser e Tempo. São Paulo: Vozes.
HEIDEGGER, M. (1987) Que é uma coisa? Lisboa: Edições 70. (pdf in english)
HUSSERL, E. (1992) A ideia da fenomenologia. Lisboa: Ediçoes 70.
