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Modern sophistry
23
Jan
In addition to the crisis of thought, the social
crisis that we have not been able to resolve in more than a century of a spectacular development of forces and technologies that interfere with nature and should help man and not destroy nature, perhaps the most common civilizational crisis is in politics, I use it perhaps because the thought that underpins it has been lost.
The model of modern society began in ancient Greece and Plato refers to this model mainly in his work “The Republic”, however the initial clash is against what was used as a form of power in his time: sophistic thought.
It is necessary to define the sophist so that he is not confused with the philosopher or the politician, Plato starts from the assumption that no man is given the power to know all things, which would make him a god, and in the false propaganda of the Sophist, he could only teach an appearance of universal science, and here he finds the difficulty of establishing what is the falsehood and the truth of a deceptive speech, as is present in any speech.
This difficulty between truth and falsehood is one that encourages an ontological discussion, thus establishing an art of illusion, it is necessary to investigate what are the parameters that delimit it and what provides this power of illusion, in addition to determining which its object and its relationship with what is imitated, so the sophist is not a layman, he does have an art that must be justified as illusory and harmful when one intends to formulate a critique and establish the ideal principle or norm to educate oneself.
This is the modern sophistry, what it is to educate, now it is not just about Piaget, Skinner, Constructivist, Vygotsky or any of the “modern” learning theories, but rather the problem of fragmentation and vulgarization of knowledge, where even Basic questions in mathematics, geography or literature, for example, are completely ignored in teaching.
Two modern sophisms, just to give an example, of apparently logical arguments that lead to mistaken conclusions: “Those who don’t work have a lot of free time”, the idea of using the power of the knowledge of the crowd led many people to invest “idle time” in social media activities, virtual games that are slot machines, etc., another spiritual one is one that imagines a God or an energy that creates fortunes and automatically resolves complex things in life, the logic is “If God is love and I love God, my life is resolved”, effort, dedication and personal work must come together with this attitude and this means having attitudes compatible with a dignified religious life: honesty, fraternity with those who depend on us and resilience in times of difficulty , which are normal in life.
When Plato created the Republic, he did not forget the virtues of the public man and all philosophy worked in this direction, but the mistakes in thought (philosophy) and in society (or politics) are due to the development of ancient thought in an always true direction, despite logic, because instrumentalized logic can be sophistry.
Idealism and real experience
18
Jan
The great discovery of real life (or rediscovery if
we take classical and medieval ontology as a basis) is a radical critique of idealism, which separates the subject of life from the real world, what is promised in life projected onto things and not things (our posts from last week) is the real-life catastrophe that does not translate into real and concrete values.
Phenomenology returns to real life through the Lebenswelt (world of life) that was taken up by the philosopher Husserl and that is touched upon and cited by Habermas, without really developing it.
The objective of this philosophy is to show that the human being must be the center of the knowledge process, human consciousness is a giver of meaning to the world of things, or the phenomena of this world, from which the name phenomenology comes, non-things can also reacquire meaning if we penetrate this human reason (which idealism calls subjectivity).
With this, human consciousness reacquires meaning and meaning to phenomena and things in the world, directing them to what each thing is in essence, in a path that is always intentional and thus gives meaning.
Husserl in his work “Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology”, is where this concept appears in a clear and in-depth way, because it establishes a relationship between epistemology (the systematization of knowledge) and philosophy and rediscovers asceticism.
Thus, a true asceticism does not separate the world of things and non-things, just showing that there would be an unreality in one of these worlds, as it is not separated from life, it is there that we verify that we move from the concrete world of life to a path whose evolution destroys the basis of the human and the real, wars and personal declines are this.
In Habermas the world of life is treated as something that is immediately available to social actors in the form of meaning and/or representations available to everyone, whereas for Husserl the phenomenological foundation refers to an ethics for the science and technique of the world, given that science has not managed to reach this level as a discourse on action in which the life of reflection is absent, and within science, which is what Kant’s criticism does.
Sloterdijk developed something close to this concept as a despiritualized asceticism, that is, despite working on the concept of “phenomenology of the spirit” they remain in the abstract field and their real updating in the world of life does not happen, because it is not clear what type of exercise this is.
So we carry out a series of “exercises”, we are the society of physical and mental exercises, but their translation into the world of life does not lead to concrete social and moral acts.
Husserl, Edmund. (1986). La crise des sciences européennes et la phénomènologie transcendentale. Trad. De Gerard Granel. Paris: Edittrice CLUEB.
The included third of physics and thought
17
Jan
The fact that we are trapped in dualism, A
and not-A, Being is and Non-Being is not, and now transformed into political thought as if nature and society were just always two options in conflict with no third (or even the fourth and fifth options) is an outdated thought if we look at the logical paradox developed by the physicist Barsarab Nicolescu that finds parallels not only in quantum physics (photo), but also in social and ontological thinking: the third option.
So much so that this is true that Barsarab’s own text that calls for a reform of Education and Thought (Barsarab, 1999) indicates that this change can be seen as a way out of the center of a crisis greater than physical or logical issues, says Barsarab : “One thing is certain: a large gap between the mentality of the actors and the internal development needs of a type of society invariably accompanies the fall of a civilization”, or said in another, more ontological way, between Being and non-being -Being there is a state of Non-Being that breaks dualisms and paradoxes.
Both Barsarab’s letter that calls for an education reform, and other thinkers such as Edgar Morin and others perceived a crisis in modernity with roots in thought and education, the theorist of the Included Third T, gives a worrying sentence: “The risk is enormous , because the continuous expansion of Western civilization, on a global scale, would make the fall of this civilization equivalent to the burning of the entire planet, in no way comparable to the first two world wars”.
There is also a linear and monodirectional thinking where intentionality is always polarized and creating a “single” and monochromatic path, with the eternal danger of authoritarianism and misuse of power, to detente it will be necessary to have a more open world where everyone is included and not just what is convenient for power.
Education must support and assist this context, Barsarab says in his letter: “The harmony between mentalities and knowledge presupposes that such knowledge is intelligible and understandable. But can this understanding still exist, in the era of the disciplinary big bang and extreme specialization?”
The harsh reality of the pandemic shows that we oscillate between true solidarity and detente to face the crisis, and the opportunist polarization that wants to take advantage of the deaths and deviations of a poorly managed health crisis, in some countries more, but in almost all .
Barsarab’s sentence, which seems harsh, is not: “Is there something between and across disciplines and beyond each and every discipline? From the point of view of classical thought there is nothing, absolutely nothing. The space in question is empty, completely empty, like the vacuum of classical physics”, in this epoché (the Greek vision of emptiness) a true philosophy can flourish, even when it is not (the suspension of judgment, new horizons beyond the pre -concepts, etc.) is what it is.
NICOLESCU, Basarab. The manifesto of transdisciplinarity. Trans. Lúcia Pereira de Souza. Brazil, São Paulo: Trion, 1999.
From information to narration
02
Jan
The title is purposefully the opposite of the first
chapter of Byung Chul Han’s book on the crisis of narration, although he quotes Walter Benjamin who cites the experience of narration in a period before the internet, but the Korean-German philosopher does not clearly see this previous crisis the internet, and thus he himself falls into what he condemns, the absence of analysis in time.
If it is true that the Internet and its tool for making information available to laypeople, which is the Web (born in the 90s, more than 20 years after the internet) not only created a profusion of means of disseminating information and its narratives, but also created the possibility of its profusion in audio and video, which gives rise to a new possibility of recorded narration for podcasts and videos.
Of course, this does not mean that that primitive narrative prior to writing and the press, typical of primary orality, has returned, it exists in original cultures and also in some Western cultures and beliefs, for example, among the Kurds there are the “çîrokbê” who, if it were Literally translated, it would be what we understand in Western culture as “history”.
Byung Chul Han’s sentence about the digital universe is clear: “Digitalization deobjectifies and disembodies the world. It also eliminates memories” (Han, 2022) this is partly true, but digital media itself, once recorded, becomes a thing, and once a narration is made, just for example, by Kurdish narrators, the information (in the sense of Chul Han) returns to narration, that is, the reverse process is possible.
Its error, from a philosophical point of view, is an old question about what things are (or what they are), the relationship between subject and object is the result of Western dualism since Parmenides, and only a non-dual vision can understand that the A thing is also not a thing in itself, once narrated.
Thus, information will always be paradoxical, it is narrated when it is and not narrated after it has become narrated-information and is subject to historical distance, but if seen from the point of view of quantum physics it is even more complex, because there are both things, from which the question arises from some physicists that time does not exist, difficult for today’s culture.
This question of time arose in 2012 in a TedTalk by the Italian Carlo Roveli: “Time Doesn’t Exist and I’ll Tell You That in 15 Minutes”, but has gained popularity now because the James Webb mega-telescope proposes several new paradigms when looking deeper into the universe, We are at the end of the Copernican era, the center of our galaxy is a black hole and they have already started to say what they are, dark matter and dark energy are also beginning to be revealed.
The theoretical physicist Michio Kaku gives the history of this idea, “In The God Equation” (ed. Record, 224 pp, trans.: Alexandre Cherman), and there he gives a written account of today’s physics.
Han, Byung-Chul (2022). Não-coisas : reviravoltas do mundo da vida / Byung-Chul Han ; tradução de Rafael Rodrigues Garcia. – Petrópolis, RJ : Vozes, Brazil.
Happy 2024 and blog line
31
Dec
It is difficult to make a positive assessment of 2023,
we expected some positive reaction from humanity in the post-pandemic where many died as a result of the worsening of collateral diseases caused by the coronavirus, we expected more solidarity and respect for human life.
Ukraine will start the year with a day of mourning due to the massive attack carried out by Russia that killed 39 people and injured 159 others, most of them civilians, the UN declared the attack “unacceptable” and the United States admits direct intervention in war through its troops, this would in practice represent the beginning of a 3rd. World War.
In addition to this crisis, there is the scourge of war in the Gaza strip and tension between Venezuela and Guyana.
The year is not yet over and this month the blog broke its record number of hits with more than 32 thousand and the new line where we delve deeper into the issue of the noosphere, based on Teilhard Chardin who coined the term, also the crisis of thought (we see that the philosophy is also experiencing a crisis) and which is the origin of the current civilizational crisis and Cyberculture, with ethical and social aspects that are deepened in readings of both the emergence of new technologies (ChatGPT, Bard, Azure, etc.) that enter the Era of Generative AI, in the LLM (Large Language Model) model.
The complex scenario requires reading a few authors who detect the golden thread of the current crisis, the idealistic model that comes from the dualism of Ancient Greece (being is and non-being is not), the centralizing and monopolizing state model (even the liberal model that grows in some countries continues to dictate centralized theories and models) and whose crisis affects the social body, culture and even religion where there is no shortage of false prophets, soothsayers and apocalypticists, this appeal grows depending on the severity of the time.
We leave a breath of hope, of certainty that it is possible to emerge from a crisis with balance, responsibility and a dispassionate look at problems, passion for life yes, but not that of fanatics and saviors of the country who contribute little or nothing to humanitarian and responsible for the human future.
Chardin’s universal vision
28
Dec
For a certain time, Chardin’s vision of a universe
formed from a divine intention, its evolution within a geosphere, then a biosphere and finally the current stage that is a noosphere (noon – spirit) was considered heretical, but at the time few were changing, many philosophers and theologians began to study him, his works were being published and acceptance by the church was being considered, to the point of even thinking about his beatification.
One can think in the current controversies, without serious doctrinal meaning in my opinion, that this is due to a certain heretical “modernization” of the church, but the most diverse theological thoughts within the church reflect on the validity of this vision that updates Christian thinking and gives a great opening to what modern man has discovered and continues to discover about human life on earth and the cosmos.
In a homily by Pope Benedict XVI, on July 24, 2009, in a homily in Aosta, Benedict XVI quotes Teilhard de Chardin, as a positive illumination: «The function of the priesthood is to consecrate the world so that it becomes a living host, so that the world becomes liturgy: that liturgy does not pass by the reality of the world, but that the world itself becomes a living host, becomes liturgy. This is the great vision that was later also that of Teilhard de Chardin: in the end, we will have a true cosmic liturgy in which the cosmos becomes a living host.”
And this is not a new doctrine, although Chardin brought it closer to Science, the Second Vatican Council in the Constitution Gaudium et Spes (nº 5), in fact, declares: «In short, the human race passes from a basically static notion of the order of things to a more dynamic and evolutionary conception: this gives rise to a huge new problem that requires new analyzes and new syntheses.”
And in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (n. 310), we read: «God freely wanted to create a world “in a state of progress” towards its ultimate perfection and Jesus will come in his glory, after wars, pestilences and other civilizational difficulties, to save him, says eschatology.
Thus, not only does original sin, the expulsion from paradise and the human future open up to a new perspective consistent with the doctrine, but it also clarifies controversial points historically, we would say due to the Copernican revolution, man and the world are neither geocentric nor heliocentric, at the center of the galaxy is a black hole, so we could say that it is noocentric,
GRONCHI, Priest Maurizio. In the thoughts of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. « J’étudie la matière et je trouve l’esprit. », L’Osservatore Romano, 29 December 2013.
Smooth the paths
15
Dec
All of reality seems like a huge mess, and in fact it
is without a meditative perspective (the vita contemplativa that we posted last week) and without a prophetic vision that goes beyond factual reality, which is almost always dualistic because it only sees through one aspect. guys.
There will be wars, revolutions, people against people, everything that overwhelms false prophets, soothsayers and bad biblical readers, announcers of themselves and not of divine reality.
Yes, the biblical reading is this Mt 24,7-8: “For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places; but all this is the beginning of sorrows” yes, but this “will not be the end” and the reading does not stop there: “many false prophets will arise and deceive many”.
Although we are experiencing a great civilizational crisis, the Bible speaks of the “great tribulation”, all of this is in reality a “straightening of the paths”, as John the Baptist did at the time of the coming of Jesus.
They asked him if he was the Messiah or Elijah (John 1:22-24): “They then asked: ‘Who are you after all?’ We have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?’ Then John declared: “I am the voice that cries in the wilderness, ‘Make the way of the Lord plain’” as said the prophet Isaiah”, who prophesied that God would send light and joy through a child , and who would break the “yoke of his burden” (Isaiah 9:4) and would be called “Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (verse 6).
It is indeed a civilizational crisis, models of society in shock, dangers of wars in limits and proportions never imagined, but all of this is also “smoothing the paths of the Lord”, the coming of a New Civilization, not that of false prophecies, but the kingdom of peace.
Beware of false prophets, with promises of paradise that do not come true, they also feed on crises, cruelty and wars, but do not propose peace and justice, or they don’t build them.
What was happiness for the Greeks
09
Nov
The Greeks defined happiness as Eudaimonia
over the various human conditions: for those who are hungry, happiness is food, for those who are cold, warm clothes, for those who are ambitious, money, for those who are vain, honors, for those who are sick, health. , etc.
This is why, as we previously defined, rational happiness was called “good life”, and if so, how can we maintain that happiness is the good for men, since it must bring with it that they are common to all and the real possibility of life for everyone.
The purpose of life for each man can vary greatly from person to person, there are those who relate happiness to pleasure, pleasure, enjoyment, without any pain, but it is necessary to recognize the finiteness and limitation of these values and understand that life Full requires balance, give the necessary virtues, in Greek the arethé, Aristotle did not refuse pleasures, however he warned that this type of life aims only at the immediate and it is necessary to look at what remains.
Happiness is self-sufficient, that is, it is not desirable because of something else, and it is desirable in itself, so throughout life, we must shift our gaze from the outside to the inside and look within ourselves at those attachments and attachments to things temporary pleasures that are only temporal pleasures.
It was from the analysis of virtues and the practical exercise of ethics, Aristotle concluded that happiness is an activity, which is why it cannot be found potentially in man, it is not considered a virtue, although it does not occur without it, there is this potentiality in U.S.
Prudence and happiness
08
Nov
Breaking the rules or getting out of the box, there are
even books encouraging throwing everything away, is different from what the Greeks thought, of course a life that is going wrong needs to be analyzed.
I used the word happiness, because the word used by the Greeks is “Good life”, which in its current connotation means eating, drinking, spending and sleeping, but it was not the conception of Aristotle and other ancient philosophers.
In Nicomachean Ethics, the philosopher demonstrates that to achieve the “good life” we must take into account our instinct, sensitivity and intelligence and, through the conjunction of these three elements, cultivate our best side, because, for example, instinct can be a trait of personality that does not lead to balance, this is where the idea of prudence comes in.
In book governs science, and prudence (phónesis) governs ethics, however the Greeks believed in an absolute science, capable of knowing the deepest structure of Being.
Such a core is eternal, immutable, absolute, and the ethics that is a consequence of this is practical science.
In it, prudence governs temperance, which is what will govern our instincts, it is what determines the good exercise of temperance, the wise person in ethical decisions is the one capable of finding the middle ground (ne quid nimis: nothing in excess), that is one of the practices.
It contains virtue (arethé) and in the soul there are three types of functions: irrational (nutrition, growth, etc.), motivational (generating actions) and rational (linked to our cognitive capacity that makes us capable of achieving true).
Just to give a practical example, whoever controls personal finances could include a description field in inputs and outputs, an explanation of the reason for spending or obtaining the resource.
For Aristotle, virtue is something that occurs in the soul, that is, our interiority, so he divides the virtues into ethical (courage, generosity, friendship, justice, etc.) and dianoetic (wisdom, temperance, intelligence, etc.).
So we can change a saying and now say that “the habit makes the monk”, now not with outer clothing, but with inner clothing, virtues create “virtuous circles” in us.
What is Love after all
27
Oct
Although Hannah Arendt’s work is not definitive
regarding love, the advisor Karl Jaspers himself expressed this, developed and appropriated some fundamental categories in his doctoral thesis “Love in Saint Augustine”.
According to author George McKenna, in a review of her dissertation, Arendt tried to include a revision in her “The Human Condition”, but it is not very clear in the book (of the Arendt), which is excellent.
If we can also express an expression of this love in ancient Greek literature, such as agape love, the one that differs from eros and philia in this literature, from a Christian point of view the best development made is in fact that of Saint Augustine.
First because he separated this concept from good x evil Manichaeism, a dualism still present in almost all Western philosophy due to idealism and puritanism, then because he was in fact raptured upon discovering divine love, he wrote: “Late I loved you, O beauty so ancient and so young! Too late I loved you! Behold, you lived within me and I was looking for you outside!” (Confessions of Saint Augustine).
Then man must love his neighbor as God’s creation: […] man loves the world as God’s creation; in the world the creature loves the world just as God loves it. This is the realization of a self-denial in which everyone, including yourself, simultaneously reclaims your God-given importance. This achievement is love for others (ARENDT, 1996, p. 93).
Man can love his neighbor as a creation by returning to his origin: “It is only where I can be certain of my own being that I can love my neighbor in his true being, which is in his createdness.” (ARENDT, 1996, p. 95)
In this type of love, man loves the divine essence that exists in himself, in others, in the world, man “loves God in them” (ARENDT, 1996, 95).
The biblical reading also summarizes the law and the Christian prophets as follows (Mt 22, 38-40): “This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is similar to this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’. All the Law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
Love contains all the virtues: it does not become conceited, it knows how to see where the true signs of happiness, balance and hope are found.
ARENDT, Hannah. (1996) Love and Saint Augustine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
