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The knowledge and doing
The society we live in is a performance society, as Byung Chul Han calls it, who did his doctorate at Heidegger, it is a society of doing, but not of knowing how to do.
Remembering “old theorists”, deifying ancient theories that had a determined temporal functioning, constitutes the setback and crisis of philosophy, not of thought, because man as a Being is capable of unveiling and discovering, because there is a forgetfulness of being.
Knowledge not closed in logic, with openness and possibility of new discoveries is the constitutive movement of time, there is not something fully understood and finished, it is constitutive of what happens in time, and it is subject to history, it is knowledge practical and of life, a Lebenswelt as Husserl called him.
Heidegger started from there with the direct influence of Husserl, the meaning of his Phenomenology supposes this opening for seeing things as they manifest themselves, the principle of knowledge.
Thus, there is not something understood, finished, what there is is a comprehensibility in a constant becoming, implying practical knowledge, a know-how that is more than the objective of science, it must be the foundation of every comprehensive act as one that seeks to know.
The essential opening is not for the hermeneutic consciousness as seen by Heidegger a primarily rational act, it is an affective disposition, one of the structural existences of the being-there, it is shown that understanding is always an affective understanding, in the sense of “affecting”.
Interpretation follows affection, but what is interpreting here if not revisions and elaborations of meaning, set in motion, thus interpretation is for Heidegger:
“The interpretation of something as something is essentially based on having-prior, seeing-prior and concept-prior. Interpretation is never an unassuming apprehension of something previously given […]” (HEIDEGGER, 2014, p. 427).
One of Heidegger’s central philosophical problems is the question about the possibilities of language, it is from this that the Being elaborates its worldview, from which it cannot escape, it enables us to understand the world, it elaborates the being-in -world.
Being in the world that would imply know-how depends on the worldview, impoverished and obscured by performance, the demand for efficiency and poor articulation with time.
HEIDEGGER, M. Ser e tempo (Being and time) Translation, organization, previous note, attachments and notes by Fausto Castilho. Campinas, SP: Publisher of Unicamp; Petrópolis, RJ: Editora Vozes, 2014.
The being in its authenticity
Heidegger’s incursion into what social life is is that it is governed by an obscure notion of what coexistence is, where there are no subjects but an empire of the impersonal, of the empire that the translation into Portuguese is very good, empire of “we” is a truncated sociability, it is not just individualism, but a place where neither the “I” nor the “we” are distinguished.
This individual space is the one that levels everything down, a loss of Dasein in the open space of “public opinion” (Öffentlichkeit]), a truncated sociability, even us does not include the Other.
In this being there of Dasein to what extent he deals with other people in his daily environment, for this Heidegger takes a step in the determination of existential analytic, which is to answer how the world opens to Dasein, regardless of whether it is the world of things or of men, this can be understood by how he sees the opening to the world.
He sees it as a first and fundamental opening in a triple way: the disposition, the understanding and the interpretation, understanding that this makes him involved with the world.
So first the human being is taken by states of the soul that unreflectively open the world to him, usually through a certain deviation, a disposition, he understands the world not as a theory or concepts, but as Dasein itself is understood in a situation.
Thus disposition becomes understanding, but it is not man who understands the world, but the world understands man in a totalizing way, where the whole human being is under-stood (in sense of under-pres) and this refers to the concept of project (Entwurf) in an essential sense: it is designed in the world.
This project gives man the possibility of interpretation, and only then manages to translate the world into speech and language, considering that the proposition and the utterance always imply a later moment in the existence of Dasein.
It is these openings to the world in speech and language, however, that must take into account the proposition and utterance as implying a moment, always later, in the existence of Dasein, but the tendency to cover up in Dasein is always strong so that it becomes free.
This fundamental trait of concealment and escape from oneself asserts itself and determines the being-in-the-world of the being-there (Heidegger, 1989) raises the question of the possibility of the being-there leaving its inauthenticity.
HEIDEGGER, M. (1989) Ser e Tempo Translation by Márcia de Sá Cavalcanti. Petropolis: Vozes.
Metaphor-statement and other figures of speech
Paul Ricoeur makes a deep analysis of what he calls the “Rhétorique generale” as one that reserves only to metalogisms that which incorporates discourses, beyond which there are metasememas, which is a type of figure of speech that modifies the meaning of a word .
Just to give an example within the philosophy of metasemema, the word eidos from Greek culture translated as idea, became in modernity something else that it was for the Greeks.
The importance of this metaphor-statement is said by Ricoeur himself: “the most apt to show the deep kinship, in terms of statements, between metaphor, allegory, parable and fable and, for the same reason, it allows us to open this entire set of figures – metasememas and metalogisms” (Ricoeur, 205, p. 265), while a good part of the discourses (Ricoeur cites Retórique Generale) are reserved only for metalogisms.
The metalogisms are the logics that are beyond the figures of languages, for example an allegory, so Ricoeur creates for the first the concept of a trope, where the meaning of words only changes while the second conflicts with reality itself.
For this, he uses the figure of the “drunken boat” by Rimbaud, who used the expression “the drunken boat joined the great solitary sailboat” (p. 264), which “are allegories of Malraux and Gaulle, as these are neither boats or sailboats”, explains Ricoeur: “the tension is not in the proposition, but in the context”.
The impact of this analysis, as Ricoeur himself points out, is that the “deviation” of the word carried out by the metasememe, the metaphorical utterance “re-establishes the meaning” (p. 265).
This semantic impact “which concerns the entire utterance, so it is necessary to name the entire utterance as a metaphor with its new meaning, and not only the paradigm shift that focuses on one word the mutation of the meaning of the entire utterance” (p. 265) the clearest explanation of his metaphor-statement.
The long analysis made by Ricoeur, by authors known as the classics (Aristotle and Plato), Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, and reasonably known as J. Dubois, F. Edeline, and others little known as Le Guern and Jean Cohen, makes it his own complex but very important work.
The great merit and importance of the deep and hermeneutic analysis of metaphor as the center of the question about current narratives, which involve the linguistic use of various figures of languages such as allegories, parables and metonyms, is shown on page 275, illustrated above, and beyond this discourse to establish a high goal as the one that penetrates the “ineffable”.
RICOEUR, P. Metáfora Viva. Living Metaphor. Brazil, São Paulo, trans. Dion David Macedo. 2nd ed., Ed. Loyola. 2005.
Living metaphor and narrative
Both are themes of Paul Ricoeur, but establishing a clear connection between these two concepts is no simple task, the author himself will not say between metaphor and narrative, there is such a concept.
This is because, as we have already found in a previous post, it is almost a refoundation of eidos (what was an idea for the Greeks), giving it (the metaphor) an “ideology of the ineffable”, which is nevertheless attainable since it is in the consciousness as an unspoken.
Also in this post we emphasize that living metaphor starts where linguistics ends, and narrative is in close connection with linguistics, but it would be bold to say that narrative is not also a form of metaphor, so in this unexpected intersection between narrative where metaphor lives .
Metaphor in the reading of the Greeks, in Aristotle’s poetics and rhetoric, the word or name are basic units between poetics and rhetoric, while the second is more focused on mimesis.
The idea that language has a function other than the conventional one, was defended by Heidegger saying that it has this other function is poetics, and it refers us both to metaphor and other figures of speech that are beyond the so-called “poetic license”, for it has a rhetorical function.
It is found in the current definition of metaphor as that figure of speech in which an implicit comparison is verified, but what is the relationship between a comparison and metaphor?
Ricoeur clarifies that at the core of this relationship, there is “a small enigma” in the Aristotelian discourse, at the origin of this question, “because this treatise (of Rhetoric), which claims to add nothing to the definition of metaphor given by Poetics, in chapter IV draws a parallel no counterpart in this last treatise, between metaphor and comparison?” (Ricoeur, 2005, p. 42).
Ricoeur’s first response is that it depends “within the Aristotelian corpus” (p. 42), but he will object to the purpose that is not explicit, “Aristotle points out the subordination of comparison to metaphor”, so “it is not to explain here metaphor through comparison, but rather comparison through metaphor” (p. 43).
This enigma becomes the theory of metaphor-statement in Paul Ricoeur, more than a rich figure of speech, it is broken down into two parts: “under the name of ‘parabole’, it is linked to the theory of ‘proof’ (Book I of Rhetoric), which consists of illustration by example, which subdivides, in turn, into historical or fictitious example; the other, under the name of eikon, is linked to the theory of lexis and placed in the domain of metaphor” (p. 44).
The resources and arguments of living metaphor allow us not only to understand the narratives, but also to penetrate their constitutive elements as resources of language and knowledge.
RICOEUR, P. Metáfora Viva. Living Metaphor. Brazil, São Paulo, trans. Dion David Macedo. 2nd ed., Ed. Loyola. 2005.
Close your eyes
It could be the other way around, but the reality is so frightening that it will only be possible to see the one who has concluded the courage to do what seems insane right now, look inside and see how much he collaborates with this very harsh reality.
The diagnosis came to me unexpectedly while I asked what is eternity and where I want humanity to go, I had the intuition that everything should change starting with me, and knowing the new book by Byung Chul Han some answers were there, I received the book in two days and I can already comment on it.
The intuition was based on what many already know: the great utopias and the great speeches collapsed and the obvious question was then where will we go.
Chul Han’s clues are inspiring, without the book’s subtitle: “Please close your eyes: in search of another time”, edition now from 2021 by the publisher Vos, the essay is from 2013.
One might think that we live in a time of acceleration, but Chul Han points out that “narratives do not allow themselves to be arbitrarily accelerated, acceleration destroys their own structures of meaning and time, the disturbing thing about the experience of current time is not the acceleration as such, but the conclusion of the missing beat”, that is, the lack of rhythm and beat.
The completion of things from the practice of new lives, the rites that cause things to be done with rhythm and pace to get things done well and reach their conclusion.
The acceleration has its cause in the universal incapacity to close, time keeps rushing forward, because it doesn’t reach the closure anywhere.” (p. 20)
That’s how I inverted my diagnosis, the end of utopias and great ideals (in the sense of eidos and not idealism), did not happen not for lack of speech or “good intentions” but for lack of conclusion.
But it is important, consistent with Chul Han’s speech, to review the impact on people, on their internal integrity of doing an experiment to the end, and Chul Han will touch on another term.
It will touch on a taboo theme of death, present now during a pandemic, “and in a world in which the conclusion and closure give way to an endless and directionless advance, it is not possible to die because dying also means presupposing the ability to end the life” (p. 29-30), understand that life is a cycle.
He also speaks of the performance subject, the one who seeks the maximum “the performance subject is incapable of reaching a conclusion”, and this leads to overcharging themselves and not concluding.
Understand that we are at the end of a cycle and if we don’t understand this well, “it has to end [ver-enden] at an inopportune time [Unzeit]” (p. 30), for this not to happen it is necessary to close your eyes and see yourself.
Han, Byung-Chul (2021). Favor fechar os olhos: em busca de um outro tem
The whole and the part
The part and whole is separated in ocidental culture.
“The world becomes more and more a whole. Each part of the world is, more and more, part of the world and the world, as a whole, is increasingly present in each of its parts. This is true not only for nations and peoples, but for individuals. Just as each point of the hologram contains the information of the whole of which it is a part, also, henceforth, each individual receives or consumes information and substances from the entire universe” (MORIN, 2006, p. 67).
This is to understand what in the complex thought of Edgar Morin calls the hologrammatic principle, this was also the starting point of the thought of Werner Heisenberg to start the quantum thinking and that has a book with this name backwards, “The part and the whole”.
Also Gregório de Matos Guerra (1639-1696), one of the representatives of the Brazilian Baroque, wrote a poem called “Eucharist”, in which he says: “God is all in every sacrament”, and how important it would be for those who believe to understand this, to understand what live the word.
Modern atomic physics has shed new light on problems ranging from ethical and political to philosophical and religious, in Heisenberg’s book in the preface which is almost a biography written in a sui generis way, he talks about dialogues with Einstein, Plank, Bohr, Dirac, Fermi , Pauli, Sommerfeld, Rutherford and several other colleagues.
The part and the whole are subtitled: “meetings and conversations about physics, philosophy, religion and politics”, which also makes him the initiator of a “complex and hologrammatic thought” as proposed many years later by Edgar Morin.
Understanding the complex civilizing situation we live in is not possible without this understanding.
MORIN, Edgar (2006)r. Introdução ao pensamento complexo. Brazil, Porto Alegre: Sulina.
It is only Trinitarian if there are three people
In the 3rd century Christians began to use the word prosopon which means the one in three persons, the first Christian council of Nicaea (325) was the divinity of Jesus discussed, because it was even easier, due to the dualism Being and non-Being, believe two than three.
To subsist the dualistic idea, some pseudo-theologians resorted to the idea that God the Father is the source and origin of all divinity, so the other two people were generated by the Father, creating a new way to deny the Trinitarian pericoresis, or if you prefer “ the dance ”in the internal divine relationship.
It was the Cappadocian priests, Gregório Magno, Gregório de Nissa and Basilio de Nissa who saw this contradiction, which comes in a new guise, from the exchange of the word prosopon (persona) for hypostasis and this in turn confused with boldness.
Basilio used the formula of Mt 28,19 which affirms that the communication of the Three in baptism manifests the Holy Spirit in the union of the Father with the son, in the same dignity, and manifests to man in baptism, that is why valid baptism is in the name of Three people.
Basilio classified the expression of faith, on the Trinitarian mystery, transforming and codifying the confused idea in the following formula: “Mia Ousía” and treis hypóstasis ”, presenting a distinction between ousia and hypostasis in the Trinity.
Hearing indicates what is common and unique to the three people, nature and substance. Hypostasis constitutes the particularity that each person of the Trinity constitutes, with no prevalence among them.
Gregório de Nazianzo was the first to apply the term perichoresis in the relationship between the two natures of Christ (Perichoresis cristológica).
Gregório of Nissa states that in the Holy Trinity there is no difference in honor and that the structure that differentiates the servant cannot apply to divine persons, since the divine nature is unknowable and eternal.
Its was John Damasceno in the seventh century (+749) who did further and a synthesis of the doctrine of Cappadocian priests, a new opening developing perichoresis, using it as a technical term designating, both the interpenetration of the two natures in Christ and the interpenetration of each other of the Three Divine People, will define what is co-substantiality.
The key to reading understanding the Trinitarian, who passes by God-son (Jesus) who abandons himself in the hands of the Father, to the point of calling him as any man would call him God and no longer a Father, is a crucial point for a theology contemporary, where the division, the pain, the injustice, the evil that man causes himself and humanity, lives, there is a face of this “Abandoned Jesus” (the figure above was found by chance on a table).
Together with Him we find dialogue, we overcome radicalisms, misunderstandings and errors.
The Trinity and Contemporary Christian Philosophers
Works on the trinity in Christian patristics include the work De Trinitate by Augustine, the Cappadocian priests: Saint Basil and Saint Gregory of Nazianzeno (image), João Damasceno and Tomás de Aquino, these from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, who worked at pericoresis in the Trinity.
I begin with a reference that I consider important for the adoption of phenomenological and hermeneutic thinking, the work L´Idole et la distance (1977) by Jean Luc Marion, he like others depart from Saint Augustine, but as a good hermeneutic he only wants to play “the Trinitarian game [ie, the Trinitarian pericoresis] ”that she take on the desolations including metaphysics, and take us to patience, work and humility.
It refers to pericoresis with a “dance” and desolations are the philosophical criticisms that the 19th century, in particular Nietzsche, made religion, especially the idea of God, will identify that the idea that the death of God would bring to man the light, if we look at reality, we will see that it did not happen, we see a man without humanism, now in the horrors of a pandemic that does not yield and the danger of a civilizing crisis.
Hermeneutics due to its interpretative structure, transmission and mediation “do not refer only to the annunciation, to the communication of God with man, they define the intimate life of God himself, who, for this reason, cannot be thought in terms of a immutable metaphysical fullness” (in the work of Gianni Vattimo: Etica de la interpretación, 1991).
Away from Hegel’s absolute idealism, and advancing the idea of Trinitarian ontology, which began in the early twentieth century, authors such as Pavel Florenskij, Sergei Boulgarov, more recently John Zizioulas and several Italians such as Massimo Cacciari, Bruno Forte, Piero Coda and na Germany Joseph Ratzinger and Klaus Hemmerle, in France we have already mentioned Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry.
Piero Coda uses a category of the founder of the Focolare Movement, which is the figure of Jesus Forsaken to make his “Trinitarian dance” a daily relationship with all beings and thus recreates the Trinitarian ontology, which is able to establish a relationship between the Logos expressed in Jesus, and fully realized in his figure when already faint and surrendering the pains and sufferings of the cross, he no longer calls God Father, but only God: “My God, my God because You forsook me” says the biblical account, it seems parodoxy, a pericoresis with man.
Coda says: “in some way the eternal circulation of the love of the Three is communicated to us in history … its opening to the history of men” (Dio uno e trino, Edizione San Paolo, 1993, p. 141).
There was an understanding of this reality, but the hermeneutic interpretation has not yet existed.
Dwelling and the clearing
Both dwelling and the clearing precede the idea of Being, since ancient philosophy, Being is also “home”, but modern philosophy has recovered language, an event called linguistic turnaround, and Heidegger’s phrase is worth: “Language is the house of being ”means an ontological identification between being and language.
What is this “home” means what is being while being, means removing from being its adjectives to be what is, for example, man as a man without his color, religion, sex, nationality, age, culture, nothing that particularizes it and separates them from each other, this is where we find being.
That is why Heidegger’s definition of language, but in a broad sense any form of communication from a simple look to a long speech, and even the use of some apparatus to enrich (or impoverish, of course) language.
To inhabit the clearing therefore requires first that we unveil what this Being is, and then the being that is what is worth to be, while the “being-there” (Dasein) is what is in the being.
This was veiled in history, and even more in modernity, which projected the whole being on the being, that is, under its characterization and determination, but what it is has been veiled.
Gorgias (485-380 BC) was the first in the history of philosophy to deny the existence of being, for this he also had to deny reason, and existence in absolute, “nothing exists absolutely”, so there is no truth, it is the principle that today we call relativism.
The existence and reality of Being, although veiled, is the possibility of a clearing, an opening for transformation will depend on it, for change both in the human relationship, since this is the fundamental language of being, as in the relationship with nature, which it also determines the being-there.
Everything can become unveiled if we remove the veil that covers being, and we also discover its interiority, which the philosopher Byung Chul Han calls negativity, which is his reflection under what he is, seeing himself as in a mirror, and so on. to be able to see oneself as Being.
What do we mean by moral today
Almost every rational and elaborated basis on morality is based on an idealistic theory, which belongs to both rational thinking to Hegel and Kant, but in both there is already a criticism of pure and empirical rationalism, so what kind of morality is this socially proclaimed.
It cannot be said that it is positivist, nor communal, nor at the other end something merely platonic, the fact that both insisted on distinguishing the approach of practical philosophy both in Kant and in Hegel, where they are distinguished then.
Both set out to undermine the skeptic’s doubts about the possibility of objective judgments and practical requirements; both, moreover, reject positivist derivations of the law, exclusively empiricist descriptions of human behavior and intuitionist forms of justification.
Furthermore, the two philosophers seem to share the same conception of the conditions of human freedom. For both Hegel and Kant, a theory of morality and political rights devoted to promoting the cause of freedom must demand more than just the absence of obstacles to the satisfaction of our animal passions, it must be endowed with a certain rationality (idealism).
For Hegel, as well as for Kant, freedom requires, in addition, respect for the ends that we have as rational natures.
We achieve this type of freedom when our actions are motivated by the law of reason and when the social norms that restrict us are norms that we can rationally endorse.
The difference with Hegel’s system is that it overcomes a certain subjectivity of Kant’s “individual” model, but submits morality to some norm, in general, that which is established by the State, the problem of both is the relativization of the moral question, now trapped to the individual, now attached to the State, ignoring the Being.