Arquivo para a ‘Sem categoria’ Categoria
Power and domination
21
Feb
We’ve written in our previous essays about the difference between power and domination, and
while it can be wielded with wisdom and discernment, most of the time it devolves into the purest form of domination: control of opinions and narratives and the exercise of force for this, so it’s very easy to become pure domination.
Byung Chul Han in his book “The swarm” that talks about “psychopolitical” domination discusses the use of media and its control for this, current trends in the use of AI make this more dangerous.
We wrote in a previous post here, long before this war tension looms over our civilization:
“Symmetry, reciprocity, the understanding of human diversity and respect for it are almost always ignored in the models of the beginning of the 20th century, returning to them is nothing but a harbinger of a greater tragedy: the civilizational crisis with deeper roots than the previous ones”, we wrote this well before the beginning of the war in Eastern Europe.
Understanding that this is part of models of political domination of opinions and power narratives, Byung Chul Han’s analysis in his book: “What is power” shows the efficiency of using new media as an efficient and directing form of control even of our “freedoms”.
Among his analyses, we find among several discussions around modern and contemporary philosophy and the routine practices of postmodernity one that is particularly important and that escapes many analyses: gamification.
The game that, in general, motivates participants with its reward system that produces immediate sensations of success is also an exploration tool in psychopolitics. Social communication manifests itself in the grammatical lack of Twitter, in the affective appeal of the like and in the alienation promoted by influencers.
Thus, wanting, which is manageable according to our possibilities and the Other’s reactions, is trained in electronic games as a compulsive wanting, the desire is to “kill” the enemy, and the increasingly compulsive rhythm is being dictated by battles and speed in battles. answers.
Even if you can find advantages in gamification or think of it in educational terms: building a house, a farm or making knowledge games, there is a strong predominance of “battles” and domains of territories.
Han, Byung-Chul. (2018) What is power?. NY; Wiley.
The idealist crisis and the ontological recovery
01
Feb
The evolution of the Enlightenment in both politics and economics culminated in Hegelianism,
after passing through Kant’s critique of reason, it is the last great theory that seeks to realize an “integrated” totality, subject to “dialectical” contradictions (it is different from the dialectic of classical antiquity) and, according to his model, the ultimate aim would be to reach the full spiritual essence, which has little or nothing to do with religiosity.
It was thus the dialectical materialist asceticism that ended in an enormous void and in the “forgetfulness of being”, a term used by Heidegger to contradict the theories that since Descartes have emptied and criticized the metaphysical reading of reality, in the etymology of the word meta-physis, in this case the Greek, since its origin is from there, according to Aristotle it was the first science, it gave solid knowledge about things, and the study is confused with ontology, the “being as being”.
For Kant this study is confused with that of customs, it is a non-empirical or rational knowledge, his study on morality and “subjectivity” will start from this relationship with cultural customs and here there is already a strong dose of relativism, and deepens the dualism between Subject x Object, forgetting the “Being”.
So that which is subjective, theoretical or metaphysical is falling into disrepute and theories of objectivity, practicality and empirical realism grow, this will not be done without contradiction, but the very definition of idealist dialectic is this, the development of this concept from from yourself.
Plato defined dialectics as the art of thinking, questioning and organizing ideas (Greek eidos – image, we already posted something), so neither theory is out of the question (idealism is also a theory, by the way, not very practical) , neither metaphysics nor “being”.
The theo-ontology of the end of the measured age will establish the relations between the entity and the being, according to Thomas Aquinas he “is infinite. Therefore, if it becomes finite, it must be limited by something, which has the capacity to receive it, that is, by the essence”, present in his thesis “The entity and the essence”.
Amidst the crisis of idealist thought, see the previous post, a new current emerges from Franz-Brentano in the mid-nineteenth century, which resumes phenomenology and ontology working on the intentionality of human consciousness, which was a specific study in Thomas Aquinas, to try to describe, understand and interpret the phenomena as they appear to perception.
Brentano was Husserl’s teacher, who rereads Descartes and Kant, and elaborates phenomenology with a different meaning given by his teacher Brentano, seeks to separate what is empirical, so the phenomenon of the mental act is not something that appears instantly in the mind, but depends on the memory and elaborates from there the concepts of protension and retension, the discussion about what is consciousness today reaches the objects of Artificial Intelligence.
Heidegger was a student of Husserl, and from him one can consider both the linguistic turn (not all authors agree) and the ontological resumption.
Human consciousness and machinic sentience
27
Jan
Consciousness involves human spiritual aspects (in the idealist philosophy called subjectivity)
and that which makes man have a true ascesis that elevates his character, his attitudes and his morals in a progressive learning scale, where the error is admitted, but corrected in a humane way .
Sentience is the fact that we have a conscious perception of our feelings, it is the ability of beings (humans, because we do not believe that even a sophisticated machine can have this asceticism), and in beings it begins to feel sensations and feelings consciously.
The less we manage to be aware of our feelings, the less we have sentience and the less ability to understand our feelings, the attempt to translate sensations (types of laughter, happiness, sadness, etc. to the machine), will always be subject to algorithms, even that are very sophisticated, and that is why I call it machinic sentience, since machinic consciousness is described in different ways by different authors.
The picture representation in XVII century, um dos primeiros estudos foi do matemático inglês Robert Fludd (1574–1637).
True human consciousness is thus that which allows us to reach levels of asceticism in different ways: altruism, putting ourselves in the other’s shoes, living a just life and appreciating justice, in short, a true spirituality that elevates us as humans, and is also that which is within reach of those who suffer from human injustice and barbarism.
For Christians, what makes us achieve true asceticism is described in the so-called beatitudes (Mt 5,1-12) which speak of the poor, the afflicted, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for justice, those who have the capacity of forgiving and deceitful with the clarity of the desire for peace: “Blessed are those who promote peace, for they will be called children of God”, so in all circumstances that one lives in dark days, it is necessary to promote peace.
The contours of intolerance and violence, not only in the war in Ukraine, but in almost the entire planet should worry those who defend peace.
End of the pandemic in sight
19
Sep
This was the statement of WHO´s Director General Tedros Adhanom
on September 14, last Wednesday, but then he asked that the pandemic continue to be monitored.
Consultant Sylvia Lemos from the Brazilian Society of Infectious Diseases also told CNN: “It is something that encourages the prospect that something may be ending the end of the pandemic, but it does not mean that the world is free of surprises”, and she also asks for caution. stating that “more sustainable data is still needed”.
The protocols are that in general the use of masks is optional, but hygiene and ventilation care are not expendable, also environments where the use of mask is imperative, as there are still sanitary environments such as hospitals and places of greater danger. .
According to the infectologist, in addition to the fact that every viral infection is cyclic, the last strain must also have lost strength and not have new stronger variants, and it is obvious that vaccination helped.
The country has the lowest rates since 2020, and the downward trend in deaths and cases remains.
It is necessary to understand how the infectious disease specialist reminds us that the action of the virus “does not end” and that science will dictate the new measures to be taken from now on, such as whether there will be annual vaccinations and the prevention of risk groups.
Unless new facts occur, our weekly monitoring of the pandemic will be more sporadic.
Path and method
22
Jun
Every path requires a path, a path traced and directed to a 
scientific object is a method, there are more complex definitions, but in general they are already linked to a methodology.
A widely used definition is “scientific method refers to an agglomeration of ground rules of procedures that produce scientific knowledge, whether new knowledge or a correction or an increase in the given area”.
This type of general rule can fall either into logical positivism, a determinism about the sciences, or into an empiricist reductionism that sees the object under certain parameters.
Both Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn would argue against this view of method, Popper sees it as provisional knowledge, with successive falsifications, whereas Thomas Kuhn elaborated the idea of changing paradigms that he calls scientific revolutions, either by one or the other science must have theories that evolve over time.
Just as the path itself can lead to falsifications or new discoveries, we prefer the term path, but in order not to fall into sophistry (theories that deny an episteme) it is necessary both to focus on the investigated object and to be open to the new, as in philosophy not it must begin with a hypothesis, but with a question that one seeks to resolve.
Looking at an object imagining something similar to the Other helps, but it does not solve the problem, it is necessary to investigate its variants and its pitfalls, in short, always questioning.
Both ontology and phenomenology, both are philosophically interconnected, and both admit metaphysics, have this reference in relation to the method and its object, as well as reject any methodological and theoretical dogmatism about the investigated object.
Also the historical path is not deterministic, in this respect Hans Georg Gadamer wrote questioning Wilhem Dilthey’s romantic historicism and retracing Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle, thus changing Dilthey’s methodological hermeneutics to which hermeneutics leads the interpretation of cultural changes within a historical context,
Both Gadamer, Antony Giddens and Boaventura de Souza Santos are concerned theorists concerned with developing a methodological approach to verify the fundamental conditions under which paradigm shifts occur.
For this, one must observe the “path”, understand the path and be open to a new horizon.
References:
GADAMER, H-G. (1998) Verdade e método: traços fundamentais de uma hermenêutica filosófica. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, Brazil.
GIDDENS, Anthony. (1984) Structuration theory, empirical research and social critique. In: _____. The constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
SANTOS, Boaventura de Souza. (1989) Introdução a uma Ciência Pós-Moderna. Rio de Janeiro: Graal.
Spirituality and Asceticism
26
May
Not coincidentally, Peter Sloterdijk apprehends modernity
as a form of secularization and collectivization of the life of the exercise, displacing the asceticism transmitted since antiquity from their respective spiritual contexts and dissolving them in the frothy fluid of the current biopolitical (or psycopolytics) communities dedicated to the training and entrepreneurship of the subjectivity.
It is not by chance that a current philosopher sees modernity as a way of secularizing and collecting exercise life, displacing the asceticism transmitted from antiquity, in different cultures, to the current contexts is dedicated to training and marketing from the daily practice of exercises through memes, rhetoric and a collective training of ideas (of the idealism).
Based on his ascetology, it is possible to perceive how education from childhood to adults is in a historical chain of training through selective immunological and anthropotechnical procedures, which announced by Sloterdijk a long time ago became wide open with the Pandemic, aimed at ripping the subject out. of your community.
In this way, “state athletes” or “domestic companies” are created in the direction of these exercises, what he calls spherological drama, and where childhood has to pay a price for the absence of protesting layers, that is, when the magic circles, the soap bubbles blown by the children’s ecstatic eyes, what he (Sloterdijk) writes in the Sphere I: Bubbles.
This kind of asceticism has nothing of spirituality or a true ascension (where the ascetic root comes from) so soap bubbles are the metaphor of this ephemeral universe, whose exercise reinforces habitus, but does not build a true spiritual asceticism.
The author does not develop it, he only denounces it as a de-spiritualized asceticism, as he himself does not believe in a higher reality, of true ascension, as described in Byung Chul Han’s book in his “Society of Bournot”, where he sees the active life and the contemplative life as two poles of Being, and he turns to the monk St. Gregory.
His term spirituality comes from Foucault’s analysis of the radical forms of dominant governments of “childhood government” which he interposes: “interposes between experience and the language that constitutes history and forms the spirit”, it is thus only a subjectivity.
Byung Chul Han, probably due to his oriental influence, takes another path of an effective contemplative life, which is more clearly expressed in his work: “The branch of time” ( ), where he states: “The greatest happiness comes from contemplative lingering in beauty, formerly called theoria. Its temporal meaning is duration. It concerns itself with eternal and immutable things, which rest in themselves. Neither virtue nor wisdom, only contemplative surrender to truth brings man closer to the gods” (HAN , 2016).
In Chul Han’s work it is possible to understand a spiritualized asceticism in a divine ascension.
HAN, B.-C. (2016) The scent of time. A philosophical essay on the art of delay (in portuguese, Lisbon: ed. Relógio d´água).
The pains, the soul and the Being
14
Apr
In one of the most striking passages, at least for those who imagine
a world beyond the corporeal, Byung Chul Han introduces narrative as part of the cure: “Senseless pain is possible only in a bare life emptied of meaning that no longer narrates” (Han , 2021, p. 46).
He claims and even includes [Walter] Benjamin in “Images of Thought” that speaks of unusual hands that convey the impression that it would be like “telling a story” (idem).
He also cites mothers who, with the “healing force”, sit next to the child and tell him a story, and after explaining the narrative flow with a dam for pain, he concludes: “it is the pain that first puts in [their] path”. (HAN, 20221, p. 47).
We live today in a post-narrative time, says the author, it is not the narrative but the counting that determines life, “the narrative is the capacity of the spirit to overcome the contingency of the body” (Han, 2021, p. 48), a body without a spirit is a body that ignores its own soul.
In her, “the disciplined body that has to repel many pains that come from outside, is poor in sensitivity” (page 49), a totally different intentionality characterizes it, it is not concerned with itself, but with something that comes from outside, and it is this “algophobia” that dominates us.
“This narcissistic, hypochondriacal introspection is certainly co-responsible for our hypersensitivity (to pain), he calls it the “pea-princess-syndrome” recalling an Andersen tale where the presence of a pea on the mattress of the future princess it causes so much pain that she can’t sleep at night, and it’s this kind of illness that happens to many people.
This kind of paradox of postmodernity is to feel more and more pain, with less and less, to the point that pain is not understandable, has no place in life and seems not to be part of existence and this is a form of positivity of Being. , where there is no negativity, and makes Being incomprehensible, or less meaningless.
As the author says, “if the painful pea disappears, then people begin to suffer from soft mattresses” and concludes: “It is precisely the very and persistent absence of meaning in life that hurts” (HAN, 2021, p. 51). ).
What to think, then, of the atrocious pains of war, of innocent victims, of growing political and ideological hatred, everything seems to collapse in a meaningless universe, when pain understood would return to the balance of Being, and the fullness of our existence, distant today, but possible in the near future..
.
HAN, Byung-Chul. (2021) A sociedade paliativa: a dor hoje (The palliative society: pain today). trans. Lucas Machado. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes.
Missing data and missing facts
24
Jan
The covid is advancing and although the predominance is of the 
ômicron variable, there is already a new IHU variant detected in France, the little testing and the number of asymptomatic cases indicate that the numbers can be much higher and therefore alarming, if in fact many cases are mild, the expansion is serious because it can lead to many people with the necessary comorbidities to make the cases complicated.
Everyone has a relative, friend or acquaintance with Covid now, in addition to public figures: players and coaches, journalists, television presenters, artists, etc. the number of cases is probably much higher than the public statistics that are released.
Vaccination of children has started, but it is important to say that the largest number of inpatients continues to be adults, not precise data, but just ask a friend or relative who works in a health unit to confirm, so a protocol policy is also needed for adults, many scientists and authorities, the WHO itself, insist that the pandemic is not over.
Because it could become an endemic disease, it is true, we can go there in a few months, say some of the scientific community, such as the BBC, expressing the opinion of Professor David Heumann, of the epidemiology of infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine: “It will continue for a long time to become endemic,” he said, referring to the fact that all viruses become endemic and are treated seasonally like the flu and other coronaviruses.
But the newspaper itself emphasizes that Covid-19 evolved quite unpredictably and, according to experts, the Delta variant could have been much worse, the fact is that in that case there was a health policy and a confrontation with the pandemic, now so much Both the public and the authorities seem to think that the omicron variant is good, there are even those who think it is absurd that such “herd immunity” would be good, that is, the vast majority of people having passed through the virus.
WHO Director-General Tedros A. Ghebreyesus declared last week: “Make no mistake, the omicron causes hospitalizations and deaths, and even the least serious cases overwhelm healthcare facilities.”
We remember that this was the original negationist thesis, and to reaffirm it now, even recognizing that the prevailing variant today is less serious, would be a very big mistake.
The meekness in times of polarization
02
Nov
Meekness is a fundamental virtue for resolving conflicts,
establishing new spaces for dialogue where it ended and opening new horizons where they seem impossible.
John Calvin has a very noble phrase: “It will be useless to teach meekness unless we have started with humility”, in fact the great reason why some seem right and others unreasonable. on the sides (the opposite of humility) and within these parameters, no dialogue will be possible, or what we prefer, no “new horizon” will be drawn that establishes a future point where conflicting points may enter into a process of convergence.
Polarization is inevitable may be the arguments of some, yes if reaching a certain point of conflict this is valid, but we must know that the actual way out of a conflict will have to have the flag of peace at some point and it cannot be the The flag of submission of the vanquished, the pax Romana, after Rome conquers its territories, it is submission to an authoritarian concept that at a certain point will return to war.
Power is always asymmetrical, this is true, but meekness can lead to it being exercised with modesty and justice.
Polarization is logic may be the argument to justify it, but remember that fuzzy logic, paraconsistent logic and other logics are not binary, yes or no, and that there are never only two sides, this is an idealistic position that it induces duality, there can be multiple sides, so the really fair logic admits a third hypothesis.
These will never be winners and will always be by the wayside may be another thought, as paradoxical as the divine teaching may seem, in many religions, is that meekness and humility lead people to high, one of the biblical beatitudes says (Mt 5, 5): “Blessed are the meek, for they will possess the land” and so where is their power, the conquest through perennial values can only lead to plenitude and perenniality itself, the problem is to yield to values tricky and unfair.
The construction of a perennial reality, a time of peace and justice, as we begin to emerge from a pandemic, is fundamental, even if it seems distant.
The ineffable and the metaphor
20
Jul
The linguistic turn is one of the hypotheses of interpretation
of post-modernity, not the only one, but something beyond idealistic modernity was already emerging in the crisis of the beginning of the last century: the crisis of thought, of society (two world wars), the cold war and now polarization.
We have already posted about the link between metaphor and the ineffable in Paul Ricoeur and for him metaphor is a reagent (réactif) that reveals the symbolic in language, which leads us to think because of its excess of meaning and thus is a way of understanding available to the hermeneutician.
But there is something beyond the possibility of a hypothesis, how many scientific questions need to resort to metaphor before a final explanation, in John Searle’s work on Expression and Meaning asks an important question about what it means when we say S is P and we mean To be? And that actually the listener between S is P.
His question at heart is to know “how metaphorical emissions work, that is, how is it possible for speakers to communicate something to listeners speaking metaphorically, since they do not say what they mean? And why do some metaphors work and others not? (SEARLE, 2002, p.112).
According to the author, when thinking we should not dispense with different ways of understanding (myth, allegory, metaphor, analogy) and even less different methods to interpret them: exegesis, history, psychoanalysis, anthropology, linguistics and others, in my view, it seems like a principle more the universal because it is not confined in some methodological field and subject to its “vices”.
But the ineffable is an inherent part of the progress of human knowledge, and it means to be beyond the logical and the physical, being in that field whose most appropriate name is the ineffable.
The way in which this understanding can be reached is called the “short track”, and it was based on the hermeneutics proposed by Martin Heidegger, it consists of the way he intends to base his hermeneutics by deviating from what he calls the “short track”, proposed by Martin Heidegger, he consists in not seeking the methods or conditions of understanding, but from the being of man, his Dasein, whose existence consists in understanding, if something is ineffable there is always limitation
Answering Searle’s question, it doesn’t matter if the listener understood exactly S is P or S is R, because if S is P and this was what a source said, the recipient understood it exactly or not, it is due to its existence as a being that understands, your worldview, which may be limited.
Admitting the ineffable, which at a certain moment can only be said metaphorically, analogously or even exegetically, is to admit the coexistence of different worldviews, and this may be more palpable than the understanding of that phenomenon at a certain moment is only possible through metaphor.
