Arquivo para a ‘’ Categoria
Fraternity, worldview and religion
05
Jul
I do not know the religion of the captain of Sea Watch, but the fraternal
worldview of captain Carola Rackete (picture), unjustly imprisoned and brought to trial and released only these days, is undoubtedly the only real manifestation of worldliness in the contemporary world.
The press reported little, the Italian authorities raged against the captain’s “rebellion” to rescue shipwrecks and dock in Lampedusa in Italy, against the determination of the local maritime police, but this is the true brotherhood and religion of seeing all peoples as deserving of the same fraternity and respect.
Captain Rackete has been accused of crimes of resistance or violence against the Italian warship and attempted shipwreck for having collided with a patrol of the Financial Guard (Maritime Police of the Italian borders), and the European newspapers that always boast of any attitude in Latin America or Africa has barely reported Rackete’s arrest.
Yet the old colonialist view of looking disdainfully at the rest of the world, which is not just the American, remains and little look at its crimes and atrocities, especially against other peoples and nations that have a different worldview from Europe.
They do not recognize the penumbra and the blindness that they live, not even the worldview itself is very clear, besides the political and economic interests, little or nothing remains of a respect for other peoples and cultures, and little recognizes the own decadence and crisis of thought.
The arrogance of a limited worldview, despite its origin in Christianity, holds true for much of European thought, it is a fact that there is resistance and protesting groups, to the seemingly fraternal worldview of Europe, that biblical saying about Pharisaism in the time of Jesus , Luke 10: 12: “I tell you that on that day Sodom will be treated less severely than this city,” referring to people who rejected the fraternal Christian message.
Of course, one can only speak of a Christianity with a worldview of respect and true brotherhood with all peoples and cultures, for the rest is Pharisaism and cultural pride.
The contemptuous look at the peoples suffered, exploited and colonized is still stigma of our time, is still the result of a culture of domination and exploitation of peoples and nature.
Sea-Watch captain Rackete speaks after release from house arrest:
Uni-verse or multi-verse
03
Jul
It is not a joke with verses and poetry, we have already seen and posited that
the universe is made up of frequencies that in the last instance is music, that the first energy released by the universe were frequencies that are ultimately light, now there is a new enigma and there is more than one universe, a multiverse.
Three aspects may lead to the idea of the multiverse, two are already widely studied: the idea of cosmology that comes from the Greeks and today comes the deepest subtleties of matter and dark energy, called black holes that was enlarged with the idea of inflation, second the string theory that of simple hypothesis began to be studied and verified, and the third (or first in the historical sense, began with Hubble in 1929), the idea that the universe (the multiverse we know) is expanding then one day this united, the Big Bang.
The idea of an expanding non-expanding universe led to the second point of string theory, the mathematical-physical model suggests that the fundamental blocks are not points or particles, but strings that vibrate in a kind of cosmic symphony, emerging from music that these strings can play, however with small mathematical inconsistencies. It is these inconsistencies that create the need for a fourth nonlinear dimension such as we know (height, width and depth), but a micro-dimension that delimit how these “strings” can vibrate, the analogy with music is perfect because we only hear in a delimited frequency band, and they vibrate in a delimited range.
It is in this delimited range that is the black energy, it together with black matter composes 96% of the universe, what we know as “matter” is matter and barium energy, only 4%.
The forms present in string theory (photo) can be numerous and even infinite. The question remains if one day observation could make the vision of the multiverse possible, just as in 1964 the scientists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson captured the background radiation that came from all directions of the cosmos were the proof of the Big Bang Theory.
Scientist Brian Greene explains that the theory of cosmic inflation may someday prove the existence of the Multiverse and explains how the evidence of this theory is already present in quantum theory and in the observation of dark energy.
Watch the Ted video that already has more than a five million views:
The reduction of the divine to human environment
28
Jun
It is possible to deny the existence of God, the
argument of the evidence is naive, being neither logical as some modern rationalists wanted, nor human as some German idealists wanted and nor ontological as presented by Saint Anselm.
There is a truth that comes from Socrates that says that it is not with men, but among men, this means that it is both ontological and complex at the same time, and one can not deny the historical existence of Jesus, whether by his historical birth at a time when sense was obligatory, for this was born in Bethlehem, and the record of his death and crucifixion which is told by historians of the time, including Josephus and by Jewish historiography.
But what Nietzsche, born in a family of Lutheran religious has seen beyond his time, is a philosophical and historical evidence of the death of God, through his human epiphany through the historical figure of Jesus, at least to Christianity, while God can be thought of innumerable eschatologies present in almost every culture so as not to be exhaustive, for even the so-called barbarian peoples had some form of divinity.
But the cry of Nietzsche’s madman is the realization of the construction of idealist and positivist philosophy that he wished to take as a single discourse on reality, Thomas Aquinas and other medievals were realistic as a philosophical current, now has a dark sunset.
From this isolationist, individualistic and separatist philosophy of the world three forms of collective heresies follow: a merely human God, a purely divine God, and a total absence of the third divine person: the Holy Spirit, for whom there is no forgiveness.
This sin is not the mere denial of God, but its concrete negation is the negation of the Other. Teilhard Chardin says about the inclusion of the Other that this is the “divine medium”, the typical mystique of our time, which can also be expressed as “where two or more are in my name” (Mt 18:20), which is a “and you who say that I am” (Mt 16:15), which follows several passages of the relationship with the World and with God.
One can say that there are two reductions: the merely human and the merely divine, but the main reduction is the ignorance of a third reduction which is that of the action of the Holy Spirit. In the reduction of the divine, Jesus in miracles almost always asked for a description or made allusion to the faith of the healed, the gifted or just the wonder of contact like the blind Bartimaeus, the prophet Ana, Simeon, the paralytics, lepers or the woman to whom he directs word.
True eschatology sees not only principle or end, but both in relation to the daily life of human life, Teilhard Chardin makes reflection in the book The divine medium (1957): “the slowly accumulated tension between Humanity and God will reach the limits fixed by the possibilities of the world, and then it will be the end … that we should expect not as a catastrophe but as a ‘surrender’ to the world to which we must collaborate with all our Christian forces without fear of the world, because their spells could no longer hurt those to whom he has become, beyond himself, the Body of him who is the One who comes.”
Like the evangelist Luke (Luke 9:20), Matthew also repeats Jesus’ question to the disciples, Mt 16:15: “But who do you say that I am?”
CHARDIN, T. O meio divino (The Divine medium: Essay of inner life). Lisbon: 1957. (in portuguese).
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.
And you who say that I am
21
Sep
The truths of the facts only reveal in the truth of the acts, it is so for the daily life, so for the politics
and for the speeches, if we live in the post-truth, it has the limit of the acts.
We like day to day to create narratives more favorable to our convenience and our ideals, but almost always the unveiling exists beyond language and speech.
The creation of a logical intelligence, in deeper layers now called Deep Mind or Deep Learning, is nothing more than the artificial response to the virtual world, part of the real next to the current one, a logic consistent with the action, the human will always be some dyslexia.
Full consciousness is linked to full dialogue, where discourses can interpenetrate in the hermeneutic circle, the difference with artificial intelligence is that the machine learns from humans, but it will be difficult for it to escape from formal logic, while the human is ontological.
This means that we are in the age of Being, a deeper manifestation of what we are, and contrary to what anti-technology discourse supposes, it is precisely this that can help human speech in the essential aspects of logic, which we sometimes falsify to be correct .
Historically technology is not displaced from human needs, it is often the poor adaptation or use of human relationship with technology that causes some disruption and misunderstanding of its true role, which is to assist the craft, art and technique, says the Greek origin of the word techné.
In the biblical passage that Jesus tests his apostles, he asks: “And you who say that I am” (Mt 16:15), for some was a great prophet, for others a return from Elijah or even from Moses, not always God , that is, the Divine wisdom between us.
The reprehensible use of the evangelical message in politics is not for the fact that they should be outside the interests of the common good and of society in general, but it is the possibility of instrumentalizing and using in favor of a certain discourse that is not always coherent with the gospel
There is way, this is a method
13
Sep
Beyond the historical truth, opposed to hermeneutics (Shcleimacher) and romantic historicism (Dilthey), Gadamer deals
with the question of truth linked to both religion and art, a transdisciplinary anticipation, and perhaps perhaps its “method” (see our previous post the Ricoeur question), put it this way: “A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the ‘standpoint of art’ can deliver.
The Romantic desire for a new mythology… gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a ‘secular saviour’ for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes.” (Gadamer, 1989), of course, salvation here would be earthly and not heavenly.
In fact, it is what we understand by history that makes us skating at levels of tradition, says Gadamer on history “In truth history does not belong to us but rather we to it.” (Gadamer, 1989)
Gadamer explains the difficulties not only historical, but mainly the prejudices linked to tradition: “It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition.” (Gadamer, 1989)
And agree in this dialog´s difficult: “We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said…Understanding does not occur when we try to intercept what someone wants to say to us by claiming we already know it.”
It indicates how to put this into practical and real plans: “What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself.” (Gadamer, 1989)
It is necessary to foresee (virtually) possibilities, but to be able to adapt them within the real possibilities, so there is no romantic hermeneutics or historicism, both must bear in mind the realities and interpret them.
Gadamer, H.G. Truth and Method, 2nd edn, Sheed and Ward, London 1989.
The metaphor, the imaginary and the veiling
07
Sep
We have already posited that veiling is an essential part of truth and beauty, in Paul Ricoeur this is more
clear in his “Living Metaphor” (1975), because part of his phenomenological hermeneutics is in essential relation to the work of art, in which he the passage from the archaeological moment of hermeneutics to the teleological, that is, the logic of the ends, beyond the propositional logic.
In the Greek mimesis, the artistic production and the new had meant as instruments that give meaning to reality, but it surpasses it and it can be said there was also something teleological.
This is entirely valid, for in reading the Living Metaphor one realizes that it is a rereading of Aristotle’s Poetics, but he himself clarifies the difference by exposing that the metaphor goes beyond (meta) and transposes (pher) into a thing that designates another object, while mimesis is the idea of imitation.
But beyond the metaphor the important question in Ricoeur is that of the imagination, it must be separated from the virtual, the unpublished lectures of Paul Ricoeur in the United States, were documented and commented, this already a translation, by George H. Taylor, where the concept of “producing imagination” appears in four categories: utopian, epistemological, poetic and symbolic sacrum (Taylor, 2006), which seem to me to be more related to the virtual.
Aristotle himself states that this figure of speech (metonymy – substitution of the word, synecdoche – replaces the part for the whole, etc.) is tangent to those who wish to express questions in orality and must do so in writing.
Let us make a passage, using resources from the virtual, from the syntax (the structure of the sentence) to the meaning (its semantics) arriving at the logic of discourse (hermeneutics), this comes from a theory of the substitution of meaning (false semantics in many discourses) for a theory of meaning, a logic underlying the hermeneutic, no longer as dogmatic truth, but as dialogical truth.
The question of classification facing Enlightenment and encyclopedism will result in Gadamer’s question if there is no underlying metaphor throughout it, while Derrida asks whether there is no rationalist ability to classify all objects conceptually.
Byung-Chul Han responds non-dualistically, the truth and the beautiful are “veiled” and only that is able to see through this veil the desired “clearing” arrives, then the metaphor is a resource and dialogic hermeneutics a path, this path oscillates between the real and the virtual.
The virtual is thus the visible beyond the veil, and the real is the unveiled in the present, the representative, whose memory in the next moment is re-present or imaginary.
Chul Han also speaks of the use of metaphor in the Bible as a purposeful resource for “making them the object of desire”, I think it is more than this, that reaching the truth is done in steps and that much of life is still a mystery .
RICOEUR, P. La Métaphore Vive, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1975.
TAYLOR, G. H., Ricœur’s Philosophy of Imagination. Journal of French Philosophy, Vol. 16, p. 93, 2006; U. of Pittsburgh Legal Studies Research.
Truths, tautologies and beliefs
05
Sep
I was astonished that Noam Chomsky said: “people do not believe in facts anymore,” the crises 
(not unique, because there are political, ideological and even humanitarian crises) although all with an economic outline, the deep root of them is for a rejection of own culture.
Some will say identity, although it should not be left aside, the discourses I see in this line border on psychologism, the correct philosophical concept must be seen with the question of relation, while psychology sees as personality problems, behaviors and mental functions, then for me it’s something else. In the sociological case it has in the idea of self-conception, aspects of social representation as a single person, or in quantitative terms what differs it from others in cultural, gender, nationality, now online identity or something that is formative of one’s own identity.
Although culture comes as a sociological aspect, it is reductive because culture is more comprehensive than aspects of identity and nationalities, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn have found at least 167 different definitions for the term “culture”, which shows the breadth of the term . We have a narrow definition, but incorporate essential elements: all that complex that includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, customs and all other habits and capacities acquired by man as a member of society ” Edward B. Tylor, for our theme as it involves knowledge, beliefs and truth.
Systems that ignore beliefs are not true, but tautological, even admitting an intersection between beliefs and knowledge, because they ignore that there is knowledge linked to beliefs (figure below).
Systems that admit that in every culture there are beliefs, can differentiate the knowledge present in different cultures and that have a core of distinct knowledge, but in both there may be truth, it is a dialogical and relational knowledge.
The art, morality, and customs that are within these cultures may have no relation to truth, but each has a different nucleus of knowledge (x and y in the figure) that relates to truth, facts and attitudes help to maintain this true relationships.
Cynicism and naked truth
21
Aug
Sloterdijk said about the contemporary violence that uses the body, referring to Theodor Adorno’s
attempt to mute; “It was not the naked violence that muffled the philosopher, but the violence of nakedness,” and this prompted him to write the Critique of Cynic Reason.
Subsequent remarks to the book, Sloterdijk talked about social transformation and why she stimulated the book, in interviews to the Frontiers of Thought (in portuguese Fronteiras do Pensamento), the truth, in a society whose culture is largely part of many forms of cover-up, there is an aggressive denudation and involuntary.
There is in it a trail of exaggerated considerations that lead to the attempt (he says it is affirmative) in the foundation that it may be totally true, the expression used as an attempt to save the “enlightenment” and arguments of Critical Theory, paradoxes of the saving method take care that it does not remain with a first impression.
The idea that seemed to me to go from Clarification to Cynic, the author himself states that the very investigation of cynicism turns into the foundation of an absence of illusions, his comment clarifies the countless stops and retakes of a dense and thought-provoking book.
Clarification says the author has always meant disappointment in the positive sense and, as it progresses, both becomes closer to an instant in which reason is a statement.
According to the author, European neurosis conceives happiness as a goal and rational commitment as a path to it, it is necessary to break its compulsion, it is necessary to dissolve the critical vice of improvement, and this in favor of good, from which we so easily deviate in long gears.
The author’s synthesis of the cultural atmosphere of our time is a mixture of cynicism, sexism, “objectivity” and psychologism formed in the superstructure of the West: an atmosphere of twilight, good for owls and for philosophy.
The stomach, the mind and the heart
03
Aug
The path within the longest human body to go is what goes from the head to the
heart, or from the heart to the stomach, I would say it is the second because it goes through the pocket.
You can not eat those who have no money, so the poor discover that they must go through the pocket of the rich to have something or even begging, to satisfy the stomach.
But Jesus is harsh when he says to the thousands of followers who sought him: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, ye seek me, not because ye have seen signs, but because ye have eaten bread, and been satisfied” (Jn 6:26) material and human dogmas, and forget that the spiritual is part of the human problem, it is because of lack of soul and humanity that there is hunger.
The imprisonment of dogmas of the human mind, ignoring both the feelings symbolized by the heart and the human, economic, and spiritual problems, neglects part of man and ends up reducing it to categories of utility or idea.
The human complex must be thought and respected as a whole, reducing it to a fragment not only makes problems insoluble, but most of the time they end up aggravating it.
One reads in Arrabida’s letter on transdisciplinarity in the preamble: “the contemporary rupture between ever more cumulative knowledge and an increasingly impoverished inner being leads to the rise of a new obscurantism” (Letter from Arrábida, Portugal, 1994) .
Obscurantism is the absence of increasingly restricted dialogues and “liturgies” in the university sphere leading to the problem of obscurantism by looking at man in one or the other aspect only, denying it as a complex whole.
Not even bread will live the man, although poverty lingers on the globe, and many people live even without a piece of ground that they can call homeland.
