Arquivo para a ‘’ Categoria
Empathy: from water to wine
14
Jan
After clarified pathological situations, where empathy is just an
instrumentation or a disguise for actions that do not contemplate the Suffering of the Other, we can affirm situations in which it is really effective and can change the situation practically as a miracle, not only in the extraordinary sense but also with high probability.
We have already said that outside the ideological, cultural and social constraints, human nature destined to live in a collective situation tends to empathize for a good social life, it is enough to observe children when they are not yet contaminated by aggressive or toxic environments, to use a very current term.
Also social situations: work environments, neighbourhoods, small communities there is always a tendency where empathy reigns (or Love in a sense that is now forgotten) the greater tendency is that phronesis (in the sense that today they call emotional intelligence) and empathy, and this is not new, just an update is needed.
Many environments can change from water to wine if they are fully enriched and purified by empathy, there is always a greater tendency towards solidarity and tolerance than conflict and personal or group selfishness, in environments that are not enriched by a spirituality. it also weakens and tends not to prosper, because there is social pressure from outside where the environment is one of conflict and polarization.
Pandemic suffering was a great opportunity to recognize the Suffering of others, the pain of the Other, or just the face of the Other and its inclinations and concepts, what can be observed contextually is that conflicts increased and the opportunity was not properly seized, but not invalidity of joint efforts in regions and situations.
There are examples of these efforts in many places, right now the flooding situation in Bahia is a new opportunity in which many communities have joined the scourge of the region, donations and aid have come from various places in Brazil, although the central authorities have been somewhat negligent.
These are choices that we make of actions, habits and that become a “social character” if we change from water to wine, it is possible, as in that biblical passage where the wine was missing at the party, and Jesus being present receives the mother’s request to to intervene and his first public miracle happens only to give wine and improve the joy of that party, he orders three vats of 100 liters each to be filled with wine and then asks them to take it to the master of the party to taste (Jn 2,7), and he says the best wine was left for last.
So it is not the end we are living, but the beginning of a new reality, even if empathy has not arrived after so much suffering, it will come and a new clearing will open, like that of the paralytic’s passage through the ceiling that reaches Jesus to heal him. Rather, He heals him of his sins (Mk 1:5) so that he may have a more “empathetic” soul.
Empathy and the Truth
07
Jan
The construction of the concept of truth can roughly be divided
into three stages as having an elaboration or a narrative, I exclude the period of natural evolution of man because I consider the beginning of oral language elaborated by oracles/prophets/masters an important milestone, rather what existed was the natural man and his “search”, the three stages are: mythical, mixed orality (rhetoric and written) and written language based on Gutenberg’s press.
We are in a fourth stage that is called post-truth, therefore not its overcoming, but its crisis, the Enlightenment combined experience and Cartesian logic (Kantian is just the one that shows the limits of pure reason) and now we understand, it is one of the possibilities only philosophical phenomenology, the last step after Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer.
The hermeneutic circle presupposes what we argue in this week’s posts, a relationship with the Other, it proposes that there are always prejudices, that is, there are truths that may even have conventions, and recognize them even if they are different, being possible after these views a fusion of horizons, it is important and not secondary that Gadamer and Heidegger presuppose the existence of the text, that is, a written language which is a reference for the next step, which is listening to the Text, in orality however, it would be listening to the Other.
What we call post-truth then is the simple closure in an egoic truth, the transcendental ego, as developed in topic V of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, and which we summarized in the previous post, so it is impossible to merge horizons, logic prevails dualist and/or the idea of experience to establish a fact.
Ancient philosophy also had these embryonic ideas, Socrates affirmed (according to Plato): “The truth is not with men, but among men” and Aristotle affirmed that the truth is elaborated in the relation of the thing with its causes: Material cause: de what is the thing done? for example a built house. Efficient cause: what did the thing? Building with materials. Formal cause: what gives it form? The house itself. Final cause: what gave it shape? or the initial intention of the builder or architect
The difference between the phenomenological principle of addressing the “thing” and Aristotle is that its logic is dual: there is only A or no A, and from A to B it is necessary to go through intermediate C, in the fusion of origin a T is possible (The included third theory and quantum physics also admit this) that it is not A and not A, and one can go directly from A to B.
The Christian worldview establishes as truth the existence of a supernatural reality, above the dogmas and mysteries of science (they are themselves discovered are provisional truths) and there is an ontological criterion for the truth, a person, who is the earthly God its manifestation (epiphany), the man-God: Jesus.
John the Baptist, the last and greatest of the prophets, there are no prophets today unless a direct revelation from God Himself (thus all the prophets today are false) and John the Baptist when questioned in his time affirmed (Lk 3:16): “Hence, John declared to everyone: “I am baptizing you with water, but he who is stronger than I will come. I am not worthy of untying the strap of your sandals. He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit and in fire” ” and this is the truth of the Christian worldview.
Disempathy or untraining
05
Jan
Of course the term does not exist (disempathy), I created it to say
that it is neither antipathy nor disaffection, it is a feeling as great as the empathy that dominates the thoughts, culture and habits of a given time, as opposed to empathy, to develop the theme I take a phrase by Margareth Thatcher quoted in the film The Iron Lady (directed by Phyllida Lloyd, 2011).
In the film Margareth Thatcher, played by Meryl Streep (Oscar deserved for best actress) says: “Watch out for your thoughts they become words. Beware that they can become actions, as they become habits. Beware of habits because they become your character”, this to understand how it is possible to detrain neurons so that they are not empathetic and become obnoxious and destructive, unfortunately we are training the opposite side to our natural empathic side.
As we said in the previous post, it is possible to train empathy, it is possible to untrain it (another neologism, something natural that is corrupted by a habit opposite to the instinctive) and induce a feeling of repulsion and hatred, even if disguised or veiled and even disguised in a form of “love” that corrects the other, we must correct everything that is not agape or empathy, but rather, the others are habits or culture.
Let’s follow the path proposed by Thatcher according to the film that intends to be a biography (no, that was the main criticism), so things start with thinking, something must already be corrected right away in contemporary theories and ideologies that say that everything would begin by the “middle”, remember the discourse of contractualists, Thomas Hobbes do Leviathan (1651) indicates that man is wolf the man, that is, he is anti-empathic, whereas John Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690) defends that the individual must renounce the state of nature and make a contract (which the State regulates) and thus defends its freedom, his famous phrase: “where there is no law, there is no freedom” father of liberalism and in a way of empiricism (I think that it was born embryonic before with the vision of Francis Bacon).
Only Rousseau partly abandoned these concepts creating the “good savage”, the man is good society corrupts him, it is a principle of untraining, but he was also in favor of the contract, so it seems that handing freedom into the hands of the State is a condition “Natural”.
Thus, not only due to contractualism, but throughout the entire historical course, our thinking is linked to its contemporary roots and it is clear to what is within each culture, religion or ideological group, only through reading it is possible to detach from current thinking, and exercise to internalize takes the second step: the words.
Words like that are discourses or, as it is currently said, narratives, which are largely permeated in contemporary culture, only those who read are not linked to the flavor of this culture in its current polarization, remember that the first mental act is imitation (a neuroscience speaks of the mirror neuron), and it can be untrained, that is, it can either be taken back to its natural course of empathy or the opposite of what I have called disempathy.
It is from them that we unleash our actions, much has been said about reflection or active vitta as Hannah Arendt called it, and it was taken up by Byung Chull Han in his book The Society of Burnout, there he argues that we must also have an interior life, reflexive and so we can return to our initial course of empathy (my conclusion).
Finally, actions become habits, a good part of linguistics and semiotics starts the analysis from there, yes it is a fact that it also speaks of secondness (something that exists) and thirdness (what is), Pierce’s categories, but the theme is far and requires a greater depth which I humbly say I do not possess.
We come from habit to character, from the etymology of the word derives from the Greek “charaktér, éros”, or from the Latin “character, eris”, meaning “engraved”, therefore it is what is being carved, and it is possible to become a lack of empathy, that is, a break with the original empathic character, in the current discourse the absence of Subjectivity (proper to the subject), individualism (not looking at the Other) and a series of subcategories that are breaks with empathy.
Christmas is the greatest Bible prophecy
17
Dec
These are difficult times, with a new pandemic wave, signs of
a serious global economic crisis, tensions between Russia and the West over Ukraine and the rapprochement of Russia with China, which has interests in Taiwan, which is independent and western.
In difficult times, prophecies always reappear, but few are the oracles of God really authorized: diviners, speculators, false prophets and false mystics, they lack a clear authorization from God, and he has always been present through the humblest.
David, for example, was not even a contact between the children of Jesse, when Samuel went to his house to find someone who would be king of Israel he is only introduced at the end, so Jesse did not have 7 more eight children, says the Biblical account:
“So he made Jesse pass his SEVEN sons before Samuel. but Samuel told Jesse. The Lord did not choose these.” (1 Samuel 16:10).
Born in Bethlehem, around 1000 BC, Jesus would be born from the descendants of David, according to the Biblical account, there were 14 generations between David to the exile of Babylon were fourteen generations, from exile to Jesus fourteen more, , and also Joseph had to return to Bethlehem because that was his hometown (or his clan) , and this was prophecy.
Micah’s prophecy says (Mic 5,1): “Thus says the Lord: 1 Thou Bethlehem of Ephrathah, little one among the thousand villages of Judah, from thee shall come he who shall rule in Israel; its origin comes from remote times, from the days of eternity”.
This prophecy has historical importance, because it confirms the descent of David, a census was taken there, so there is “scientific” proof of this birth, but the great prophecy is not this one, but that of Isaiah 7:14: “Therefore the The Lord himself will give you a sign: a virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and he will call him “God with us”, and the previous passage calls attention to the house of David before the importunate of Ahaz who wanted by God the proof for cause of wars.
The conception of Mary confuses theologians and Christians in general, here that it should serve to unite is a cause of disunity due to an inconsiderate reading of the guide book for Christians, the Bible, soon after Mary knew that she would conceive and give the light to the Savior, probably still confused, runs to the house of her cousin Isabel, who also conceived a miracle in her old age (in the photo, a painting by Domenico Ghirlandaio, 1491).
When he arrives at his cousin’s house, he hears the greeting with a loud cry, the reading says (Lc1,42-43): “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb! 43How can I deserve my Lord’s mother to come and visit me?”, the theological question remains, what does it mean for Elizabeth, Jewish, the advent of Christ, Christmas, was still beginning in Mary’s womb.
There are discussions about dates, an ahistorical discussion of the birth of Jesus because there was a census, but this question “the mother of the Lord” is still open, although all Christians agree that the Savior was born there and lived among us for 33 years .
God lived among us and came from a virgin, there is no greater prophecy and will always be with us.
Truth and finities´s humans
18
Nov
Not only did Hans Georg Gadamer write about the truth regarding
Human finitude, Emmanuel Lévinas also developed the theme.
In Gadamer, the conclusion about the truth of human experience is the awareness of its finitude, that is, it is knowing your own limits, knowing that you are not lord of time and the future, nowadays that you are not lord of nature and its behavior , the great Enlightenment ideal, and so it has its limits and its plans are insecure.
Thus, in Gadamer, the issue of rhetoric and discourse is not exactly an issue and the question is not really called into question, to be able to question it is necessary to really want to know the truth and it may be outside the limits of the questioner, says in your text:
“To ask, you have to want to know, that is, to know that you don’t know. And in the exchange of questions and answers, of knowing and not knowing, described by Plato as a comedy, one ends up recognizing that for all knowledge and discourse in which one wants to know the content of things, the question takes precedence. A conversation that wants to explain something needs to break these things through with a question” (GADAMER, 2008, p. 474).
Thus, it will be inscribed beyond prejudice, and in the constitution of new horizons, thus understanding the text or a fragment of the past, for Gadamer is to understand it from the issue that should be seen as a process of continuous fusion or broadening of horizons through which the interpreter participates with others in the long and arduous path of meaning, he goes beyond the romantic and historical Enlightenment point of view, which is unacceptable: the symbolic and plural language, characteristic of the narrativity of things.
But what does this mean? what this means for the philosophical hermeneutics that recognizes human finitude, there is no immediate possibility of a coincidence with the real, as every human understanding is linguistically mediated as every language is, in the Aristotelian view, a hermenia (interpreter) originating from the real and this it can be extended to cultures, to peoples, and especially to native peoples, primary sources of discourse and their own language.
As man is finite, only in language can his fundamental dialogical power reach what Western philosophy calls objectivity (proper ideality), but it must go beyond the point of view of the anonymous transcendental subject (idealist subjectivity) to reach the dimension of co. -reference of concrete men, of others.
Concreteness is thus the word that decenters and challenges, places what is said in otherness, and its perspective of tracing a fusion of new horizons does not end.
GADAMER, H.G. Truth and Method I. Fundamental features of a philosophical hermeneutics. 10th ed. Petrópolis, Brazil: Vozes, 2008
The truth and the method
17
Nov
Hans Georg Gadamer is the heir to Heidegger’s ontological
hermeneutics, and he developed philosophical hermeneutics through his masterpiece Truth and Method, first published in 1960.
To develop it, it needed to revolutionize modern Western hermeneutics, through the critique of aesthetics, the theory of historical understanding and the development of the ontology of language, to complement the Heideggerian method of the hermeneutic circle.
The publication of Truth and Method still means, today, a new study in the science of interpretation, which enters an important phase called philosophical hermeneutics, which should help human disciplines to seek, from experience, the understanding of their own being, constituting a a new philosophical attempt to assess understanding itself as a process of knowledge of the ontological status of man, thus founding a new anthropology.
As a philosophy of language, we are in the middle of a linguistic turn, it is not just access to the thing and not the truth, as the correspondence between word and thing only occurs when the thing is known, thus learning (teaching, search , question, answer and the information itself) is only done by thinking that leads things to the world of ideas, and thus words are no more than representation of signs to which meaning is attributed. and begins his study by Humboldt.
It was Wilhelm von Humboldt who used the theory of the human “strength of the spirit” as a source of language production, his thesis addresses an “idealist philosophy that highlights the subject’s participation in the apprehension of the world, but also the metaphysics of individuality, developed by the first time by Leibniz” (GADAMER, 2008, p. 568).
As a way of questioning the history developed in an idealistic way, Gadamer, when criticizing Dilthey, starts from preconceptions, where the historian “submits the otherness of the object to the previous concepts themselves” (Gadamer, 2008, 513), and is thus illustrated in his text: “despite all scientific methodology, he behaves in the same way as anyone who, a child of his time, is uncritically dominated by previous concepts and prejudices of his own time” (Idem).
For a new understanding, as a starting point for a new anthropology, interpreting is not a means of reaching understanding, but entering into the very content of what one wants to assign a meaning in a unitary or unilateral way, but that the “Thing of which speaks the text comes to the speech” (GADAMER, 2008, p. 515).
The text at the end questions linguistics itself, which states that each language does this in its own way, but the author emphasizes another focus looking for a unity between thinking and speaking, this infers from the fact that any written tradition can only be understood, despite the great multiplicity of ways of speaking, identifying an existing unity between language and thought, thought and speech, and in this case what is the conceptuality of all understanding? Conceptual interpretation is the way in which the hermeneutic experience is carried out.
As all understanding is an application of language, the interpreter is always in a continuous development of concepts, language remains alive both in speaking and in understanding the entire process of understanding, interpreting and thinking.
GADAMER, H.G. Truth and Method I. Fundamental features of a philosophical hermeneutics. 10th ed. Petrópolis, Brazil: Vozes, 2008
Form and act
16
Nov
Information is a strong word at this time in history, however
the concept of form of in-form seems to be separate from the concept of matter, hylé for the Greeks.
Modern philosophy has separated form from content, as well as separating a label from the ingredient in a bottle, but this comes from the reduced understanding of what matter is, the hyle of the Greeks, whose thinking in Aristotelian terminology interconnects them in hylemorphism ( ὕλη, hýle = “matter”; μορφή, morphé = “form”) and in-formation is that.
For this to have an anthropological reach, necessary for the discourse of cultural diversity, it is necessary to link act and potency, as Thomas Aquinas did, where matter is not what we call today (as substance, for example), but what it is as a possibility or in potentiality, written like this by Thomas: “matéria est id quod est in potentia” (matter is what is in potentiality) (THOMÁS, ST I q.3 a.2 c).
Thus the act is the actual existence, or the acting itself, that is, “forma est actus (form is act) (ST I q.50, a.2, obi.3).
Thus, the articulation of the binomials potency x act and matter x form in this way, “matter is nothing but potency, since form is what something is for, as it is the act” (TOMÁS, ScG II, c.43), these categories they give a distinction from fundamental metaphysics, and anthropologically they mean that one thing is the possibility of existing or acting: potency or matter, something else is actually existing or acting: act or form.
Some modern theologies want to separate body and soul, that is, without eschatological and biblical foundation, otherwise the human figure of Jesus would be divided into two: the divine and the human, which would be in opposition and fight against each other, and that is why the Christian anthropology must be strictly unitary, as it is in Thomas Aquinas.
The existence of a body in the human condition is the union between power and act, between matter and form (seen in this new aspect linked to content and essence), without its actual existence (form) the body would not even exist , but only the possibility of existing (potentially) makes it exist in act, this unity is radical, since the necessary condition for its existence is the body. this is fundamental to understand the Christian anthropology written clearly by Thomas: “The human being is not just soul, but something composed of soul and body” (THOMÁS, ST I q. 75 to 4c), if on the one hand all materialism (which is not hylemorphism) denies the existence of the soul, a lot of bad theology seeks to deny the existence of the body, it is the modern dualistic relationship, crystallized in objectivity and subjectivity, in which both are mutilated.
According to Thomas Aquinas, human living bodies and actual existence (form, also called by him the intellective soul) is immortal, unlike other non-human living bodies, whose existence has a beginning and an end, not an eschatological end, but the finalist end of an interruption, for all humans die, and for him death is explained as a temporary deficiency through which we pass into immortal existence and overcome the radical deficiency of the living body through death.
Put more clearly: “That the soul remains after the body, this happens because of a deficiency of the body [per defectum corporis] which is death.
THOMAS AQUINAS. Theological Summa São Paulo: Loyola, 2001-2006. 8 v.
Nature, man and the divine
29
Oct
It is the development of human culture that can develop
these potentialities, as Morin says: “It is certainly culture that allows the development of the potentials of the human spirit” (Morin, 1977, p. 110), it depends, therefore, on the development of a culture of peace, solidarity and of preserving life within the human spirit.
We are part of nature and the anthropocentric concept needs to be modified, but it is “only at the level of individuals who have possibilities of choice, decision and complex development that impositions can be destructive of freedom, that is, become oppressive” (ibid.), but this depends on the development of culture, or on the sphere of thought (Teilhard Chardin’s Noosphere) Morin will say: “It is certainly culture that allows the development of the potential of the human spirit” (idem ), depends, therefore, on the development of a culture of peace, solidarity and preservation of life that cannot exclude Nature.
Morin will say in the chapter of his conclusion about the “complexity of Nature”, that in the so-called “animistic” universe, or mythological in the case of the Greeks, “human beings were conceived in a cosmomorphic way, that is, made of the same fabric as the universe” (Morin 1977, p. 333), and at this point Teilhard Chardin develops the concept of a deified universe, or said within Christian cosmology: “Christocentric”, which is why he was for some time accused of pantheism (many gods).
Science penetrates more and more into a universe full of surprises, from the Higgs boson to the Hubble constant that establishes both the size and the age of the universe, but is this the consolidation of the unity of physics, called today as standard Theory of Physics , but this constant has already been modified.
In astronomical terms there is the measure megaparsec, which is equivalent to 3.26 million light years away, Hubble first time measured 500 km per second per megaparsec (km/s/Mpc) earth´s diameter, but this measurement now varies between 67 and 74 km /s/Mpc.
The nature of the interior of the planet also varies and there are many uncertainties, due to the exposure of the Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Canary Islands, many serious scientists and researchers, there are many fake News on the subject, it is clear that there are still no clear theories about nature of these planetary organisms, always present in the stories.
The dialogue between different worldviews, far from simplifying or reducing the thinking of their culture, broadens and helps to develop the others, but it is necessary to be clear that each one has a contribution to make, and each one can remain in their cultural identities, for the most part of them there is always a precedence of the divine over human love.
For many worldviews the divine means to be able to dialogue with the human penetrates the mysteries of the universe and thought (the noosphere), in the Christian worldview this is explained in two steps: Love God and love your neighbor, so says the biblical passage (Mc 12, 29-31) on Pharisaism’s questioning of Jesus about what the commandments were: “Jesus replied: “The first is this: Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is the only Lord. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength! The second commandment is: You shall love your neighbor as yourself! There is no commandment greater than these”.
Thus, Pharisaism will relativize the first “commandment” to prioritize the second, only love of neighbor matters and defines the Christian, in general they reduce to their group and do not dialogue with other cultures, the second (love God above all things) , denies the inclusion of the second commandment and moves towards fundamentalism and the denial of science as a culture, in addition to also denying other non-Christian worldviews.
The dialogue between different worldviews, far from simplifying or reducing the thinking of their culture, broadens and helps us to develop the others, but it is necessary to be clear that each one has a contribution to make, and each one can remain in their cultural identities.
CHARDIN, T. (1997) Man’s place in nature, trans. Armando Pereira da Silva, Ed. Instituto Piaget, Lisbon.
MORIN, E. (1977) The nature of NATURE. Lisbon PUBLICATIONS EUROPA-AMERICA, LDA., 1977.
The night of culture and humanism
19
Oct
Edgar Morin considers contemporary culture something broader
than what is considered and was theorized as mass culture, for him it goes beyond media culture, which is in full decline, despite reactions from the art world in some segments, in general it deals with death, the dark and contempt for symbols, values, myths and images related to everyday life and the collective imagination, but regional, religious and humanist cultures persist in an act of resistance.
The industrial process and the success of performance and productivist values hide what is processed in the spirit, something Morin calls “industrialization of the spirit”, this second colonization is not processed horizontally conquering territories, but vertically penetrating the human soul and obscuring it.
The cultural industry has set in motion a third culture (in addition to classical and natural, I would call original), but there is a human resistance that comes from the original culture of each people and each specific culture, but the idea of colonizing is alive.
The multicultural realities present in mass culture are not autonomous, so the idea is to demolish (or erase) the institutions that can resist this new “colonization”, and resistance can only arise from the cultures of peoples, from their original development of culture and its religions and beliefs.
Although one can criticize the current media culture, social networks are a ties between actors that can be made through them, it does not find a society devoid of culture to be omnipresent, it contains social values and symbols, beliefs and ideologies , and in them the transcendental factors are still impregnated, it is not a separate culture.
In Morin’s view, mass culture integrates and disintegrates at the same time in a polycultural reality, it makes contain, control, censor (also in many cases by the state and by the churches) tending to corrode and disintegrate other cultures.
It is now a cosmopolitan and planetary culture, and it will constitute the first truly universal culture in the history of mankind, while conservative thought considers it plebeian barbarism, left-wing critics consider it an opiate of the people and deliberate mystification , and so the only perspective seems to be the authoritarian one.
In the authoritarian case, the state must control the production and distribution of “cultural goods”, while in the democratic case the large cultural groups must dictate the media controlling the production and distribution of content, here digital media is present.
Both currents agree in the criticism of mass culture, classifying it as a poor cultural product, of low aesthetic quality and without originality (kitsch).
The great solution pointed out by Morin is in the structure of the imaginary: the use of archetypes that order dreams, without the standardization of mythical and romance themes, art is a great reaction in this field, the cultural industry was reduced to archetypes and stereotypes, who outside of these there is no cultural “insertion”, and her prisons are individualized products.
It’s not about accepting diversity, but increasing consumption, just as it did with the pop culture of the 60s, movies, radio or TV shows (now lives and stories) are solely aimed at maximizing profit and audience (likes and fanpages).
In religious terms, syncretism is the most suitable word to translate the tendency to homogenize culture and dictate values and the comicity used to these themes plays the role of destroying its essence and originality, everything is similar or equal.
Children’s cultural content is invaded by themes of adult consumption: they are presented in a simplification that takes them (to adult viewers too) as children.
Even leisure is not just a way of allowing a balance of life, but it is invaded by mass culture, the so-called “resorts”, the beaches and leisure places are invaded by the “cultural industry”, everything within reach, just by an app.
This crisis is neither temporary nor fleeting, a great civilizing crisis may emerge from it, but it is necessary to have hope despite the public blindness.
MORIN, Edgar. (1997) Cultura de massas do século XX. (20th century mass culture). trad. Maura Ribeiro Sardinha. 9ª. edição. Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Ed. Forense.
Symmetry and diversity
13
Oct
Every relationship of power is asymmetrical, discussing the
power of the [media] of social networks, in his essay book “No Swarm” said the Korean-German Byung Chul Han: “power is an asymmetrical relationship. It fundamentals a hierarchical relationship. The power of communication is not dialogic. Unlike power, respect is not necessarily an asymmetrical relationship” (p. 18), so the question remains how power could be symmetrical and how dialogic communication.
Collective, communal and original societies always have some form of hierarchy and most of them have developed forms of dialogical communication, modernity is perhaps the historical moment of greatest hierarchy and where communication becomes more problematic, it is necessary to return to basic concepts about who is the other and what form of power is lawful”?
The worst of the scenarios come true, this is the point that Byung Chul Han is right: the swarm, but it is necessary to understand the process of development that comes from the Cartesian-Kantian rationalism-idealism, where the center is the objective truth, without space for subjectivity, it is not by chance that ethical and moral concepts have lost value, said the Kantian categorical imperative: age in such a way that its conduct is a universal model, but who is this “ideal”, “rational” being?
We know that in nature there is always some asymmetry, for example, the sides of the human body.
The answer is not so difficult if we understand diversity, there is no “individual” model that is a standard for everyone, nor is there an objective way to express power, but one that induces an entire collectivity to loving solidarity, protecting the weakest and negotiation in disputes.
It took us two thousand years, if we consider the Christian model of brotherhood, to understand that the only possible model of dialogue is respect for the Other (in Chul Han’s concept, respect is symmetrical, but it cannot cancel out diversity, a perfect symmetry is not Natural).
We are so trained and conditioned to a standard model that we call it “straight”, in analogy to an ideal line, since any object in nature that is straight will have some imperfection, and so Kant’s categorical imperative is only possible in the idealistic imagination.
Society, in its various forms of “bubbles”, did not institute and develop trust, but control, a form of power for everyone to conform to the ideal model of a certain ideal group.
