Arquivo para a ‘Método e Verdade Científica’ Categoria
The crisis of simplistic thinking and the complex
30
Oct
The epistemology of complexity is a branch
of epistemology that studies complex systems and associated emergent phenomena. In some environments, such as mechanics and physics, there has been a tendency to delve deeper into what until then had only been called dynamic systems, and now non-linear or chaotic systems.
The process of industrialization provided great support for a hitherto unthinkable development of the natural sciences, then the generation of technologies: steam and combustion, then electricity, and everything seemed to move in perfect gear.
Until a certain moment, everything was characterized by a movement that Edgar Morin called breaker-and-reducer, both in the sciences and in the arts, the idea of reducing what is complex to the simple (for example, looking for a reality in the smallest part of physics until then, the atoms) that gradually became complex (sub-particles in increasingly microscopic dimensions until reaching the quantum universe).
The particularities of subatomic physics introduced uncertainties and showed the limits of reductionism, which was leading to a distorted view of reality, showing its uncertainties and naivety, the pretension of capturing an objective reality that could be independent of the observer, when the observer himself is part of the phenomenon.
So this reductionist logic of physics was extended to the social and personal universe, and apparently simple mechanisms could solve problems that are complex, and all the problematization resulting from this reality was not observed.
Complex thinking is not limited to the academic world, it overflows and is present in various sectors of society, as well as simplistic reasoning that does not take into account the complexity and diversity of social life.
Even in the spiritual world (or subjective, as you might think, when we see objects outside the reality of the subject) this misunderstanding leads us to a wide door, where the basic values of humanism can be ignored and life fragmented.
Thus the door through which simplistic and trivial logics pass leads to great and problematic mistakes, while the complexity of a socially just and true path is not reduced to simplistic and unhuman ideological forms.
Passing through the narrow door will never be an easy path, but it is the only one that can lead humanity to a sustainable and truly human future of peace, fraternity and social values that respect human dignity.
Lack of balance and Being
17
Oct
An analysis of Western culture cannot be
complete without an understanding of Anger. Various authors have analyzed the issue. Byung-Chul Han recalls that one of the first words in Homer’s Iliad begins: “Aira, Goddess, celebrates the wrathful Achilles, who brought so many sorrows to the Achaeans and cast countless souls into Hades,” but that’s not all.
Aristotle defines anger as: “a desire, accompanied by pain, for perceived revenge, on account of a perceived disregard for an individual or his neighbor, coming from people from whom disregard is not expected” (2.2.1378a31-33) wrote in Rhetoric, but Peter in his essay Anger and Time reframes this psychoanalytical view that reduces the feeling to a mere escape valve for unfulfilled desires and rediscovers it as a 21st century political concept.
The author says: “While the link between spirit and resentment was stable – the demand for justice for the world – whether beyond earthly life or in the history that takes place – was able to take refuge in fictions that have been dealt with in detail here: in the theology of the wrath of God and in the world timotic economy of communism” (Sloterdijk, 2021), which takes on a controversial theme (image is part of book cover).
What is certain is that there is anger on both sides, and the “already” but “not yet” that was discussed in the previous post does not reside in them, because both thoughts are affiliated with modern idealism, and this is the central criticism of Kant and Hegel’s German idealism, they do not point to a new idealism.
In it there is an absence of pain, which precedes com-passion, more than an act of mercy (miseri cordis, of the heart), it is an act of adherence and justification of the existential peripheries, where the pain of justice resides, but as existential it also resides in disillusioned and tired hearts.
Contemplation and the already and not yet, which reaches both the earthly and the divine spheres, requires a vita activa which is that of psychological, family and social equilibrium which does not exclude the other, not infrequently those who defend only earthly or only divine justice, do not have a proactive action that leads to the encounter of pain, widely analyzed in Byung-Chul Han’s “Palliative Society”, eliminated pain by transferring to earthly or divine “paradise”, without our com-passion.
The balance of Being, which is already realized, but not yet (completely), has something to say about justice, the common good and peace.
Sloterdijk, P. (2021) Ira e tempo. Trad. Marco Casanova. Brasil, São Paulo: Estação Liberdade.
Ontology, idealism and truth
16
Oct
Heidegger’s thought must start from the question
of Spirit in Hegel, read by Byung-Chul in Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit “in terms of the forgetfulness of being” (Heidegger’s central question), he sees it as an “arid self” that finds “its limitation in the being that meets it” (Han, p. 334 quoting Hegel).
Although he recovers Hegel, in part, in the epigraph to the last chapter: “truth is the whole”, he re-discusses dialectics and its metaphysics in idealism: “in relation to ‘just being’, which empties it to a name ‘that no longer names anything’, natural consciousness … when it becomes aware of being, assures itself that it is something abstract. “ (Han, 2023, pg 336).
Natural consciousness (seen in this way) “dwells on ‘perversities’ … “it tries to eliminate one perversity by organizing another, without remembering the authentic inversion” where ‘the truth of the essence of being is gathered into being’ (pg. 336 with quotes from Heidegger), which sees this as a step backwards and the forgotten, misunderstood ‘already’ (pg. 337), does not appear completely negated, it appears in the form of ‘not yet’ which is not a negation, nor a barricade, placed ‘next to the already prevents it from appearing’ (pg. 337).
There is a whole development in contrast to Hegel’s dialectic, more than a topic, it could well be a book, but the dialogue he engages in with Derridá and Adorno in the chapter on Mourning and the work of mourning, leads to his vision of the whole outside of dialectical abstraction, he says the concern with immortality, with death and with the work of mourning.
The “cardiographic” archive of the history of philosophy, in which the philosopher “works” to reverse the negative of being, is not the only secret in the heart of Plato or Hegel (p. 384).
This is what will form the basis of his “work of mourning”: “to be capable of death as death”, that is, to be capable of mourning, this “tragedy” “differs radically from the noisy work of mourning of the Hegelian dialectic” (Han, 2023, p. 385).
“Tears free the subject from his narcissistic interiority … they are the spell that the subject casts over nature“ (Han, p. 394) now quoting Adorno, and the author states that ‘Aesthetic Theory is the book of tears (idem) and that contrary to Kant, and that ’the spirit perceives, in the face of nature, less its own superiority than its own naturalness” (p. 395).
“The aesthetic experience shakes the narcissistic subject who thinks he is sovereign and causes the hardened principle of the ‘I’ to crumble … the tear of the shaken and moved subject proves to be capable of truth” (p. 395).
Capable of truth, of the infinite and for those who believe in God, not a God of passing goods and false joy, but that of the already, but not yet, that beyond the pain and transience of temporal things.
Han, B.C. (2023) Coração de Heidegger: sobre o conceito de tonalidade afetiva em Martin Heidegger. Transl. Rafael Rodrigues Garcia, Milton Camargo Mota. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes.
Truth, noesis and The Bad
11
Oct
In the prolegomena to the first volume of Logical Investigations, Husserl,
who had been strongly influenced by Franz Brentano, the father of social psychology, sees relativism and its basis in the turbid worldview as a problem, so the relativity of the existence of a world is neither objective nor subjective, but “the complete objective unity that corresponds to the ideal system of all truths of fact, and is inseparable from it” (HUSSERL, 2005, p. 136).
This is because each type of object has its own possible developments, so to speak, it has its own method prescribed a priori by laws of essence determined by the eidos of the objectivity in question (Husserl, 2006, 309), which means that it is the essence of the objectivity that predetermines the type of concordant development one has in experiencing it.
There can be the experience of evidence in this experience of the object, and this contributes to its status as an entity as a “true being” (Husserl, 2006, p. 309), what Husserl called “Lebenswelt”, a logic of life, in this case of the experience of the object.
In this way, an object that is “pure X” remains stable in the midst of the multiplicity of noematic characters that emerge in the course of an experience, the object targeted in thought by human consciousness, it precedes the first intuitive idea that is noesis (thinking X).
Husserl wrote that this noetic vision is a synthesis of identity, a central concept for establishing the “effective”, “true” object, the objectivity apprehended in evident donation, in a synthesis of concordant identity:
To every “truly existing” object corresponds as a matter of principle (in the a priori of unconditioned eidetic generality) the idea of a possible consciousness, in which the object itself is originally apprehensible and, moreover, in perfect adequacy. Conversely, if this possibility is guaranteed, the object is ipso truly existent” (HUSSERL, 2006, p. 316).
The syntheses involved in phenomenological thinking, for establishing the “being” or “non-being” of noematic correlated objects, are “intentionalities of a higher order”, which is what Husserl took from Franz Brentano’s neo-Thomist thinking, getting rid of the psychologism, the eidos that we have of good and evil, still scholastic from the father of social psychology.
In Husserl’s view, the intentionality of the evident giving of aspects of the object that are not yet present forms an intentional horizon, which in turn brings its predetermined potentialities, so the factual visions of war and peace, of the devil and evil are false.
They are ill-formed intentionalities (in the sense that they don’t have a noetic truth), the truth as “being”, as “the true” in the phatic and idealist readings, is for Husserl an “effectiveness” (Wirklichkeit) since it has coherence at its core.
Husserl, E. (2005) Investigações lógicas. Primeiro volume: Prolegômenos à lógica pura. Tradução de D. Ferrer. Lisbon, PT: Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa.
Husserl, E. (2006) Ideias para uma fenomenologia pura e para uma filosofia fenomenológica. Tradução de M. Suzuki. Brazil, Aparecida, SP: Ideias & Letras.
Wars and narratives
08
Oct
Aeschylus, writing from ancient Greece, is the
author of the phrase: “truth is the first victim of war”, retired Russian general Andrey Gurulyov, spoke on the Russia-1 channel, pointing out what Russia’s targets would be, that it was preparing for a major war, Islamic Jihad is a group with strong influence in Iran and which preaches the end of Israel, its discourse is theocentric and not geopolitical.
These are just a few half-truths about the war. Of course, Israel and Ukraine are allies of the West in the economic geopolitical struggle to preserve the rights of companies and big capital, which is why both sides find it difficult to understand “civilizational” peace.
In Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus, regarded as one of the first in history on relativism, the ideas of appearance, truth and soul are combined; Socrates’ first demand to start the dialogue is that Theaetetetus abandon his initial ideas, and when he asks what knowledge is and gets an answer about geometry and other arts, Socrates replies ironically: “You are noble and generous, friend, for they ask you for something simple and you offer multiple and diverse things.” The second question is how to reach knowledge.
The second question is how to arrive at knowledge, and Theaetetetus’ answer is “sensation” (or perception). Socrates indicates that we must abandon the “familiarity” we have of things, he says in the dialogue: “It seems to me that he who knows something perceives what he knows, and to say the thing as it now manifests itself, knowledge is nothing more than sensation.”
The second answer is an advance on the first, because this is how the Greeks considered them: “On this all the wise men, one after the other, except Parmenides, must agree: Protagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles and, among the poets, those who are at the top of each of the compositions, Epicarmo, in comedy, and Homer, in tragedy…”, quoting the Greeks up until that period, the so-called pre-Socratics.
Thus, until then, truth was confined to sensation. When he begins his dialogue with Protagoras, he arrives at the idea of the first misconception of relative truth: “The man who is the measure of all things would not, in the end, be a man confined to the restricted circle of his most immediate experience and of what seems true to him alone,” and this refers to appearance.
Using this idea of “familiarity” with things, Plato opens up a crisis in the Greeks’ idea of knowledge, and thus opens up a new ontological path about the soul, starting from Homer’s “heart of the soul” (194c), there would hardly be any occasion for error, because it (the soul) would promptly make the correct identification of the current impression, breaking down prejudices.
Plato. (2010) Teeteto. Trad. Adriana Manuela Nogueira e Marcelo Boeri. LisboN: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.
The Sophists’ Justification of Power
20
Aug
The sophists were intelligent men who educated
and influenced young people in Classical Antiquity, using oratory and rhetoric, to use speech to justify power, regardless of moral aspects.
They were fought first by Socrates, we only know about him through Plato, and then by Plato (428 BC – 347 BC) and Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) who defended education for true citizenship, considering the sophists merely mercenaries of the powerful.
As we read in Plato, Protagoras was one of these sophists, he was born in 490 BC and thus can be considered the first sophist, another famous one was Hippias who would have debated with Socrates about natural and conventional laws, he was versed in astronomy, mathematics, painting and poetry which gave him great “authority”.
They have their origins in the pre-Socratics: Protagoras would be a disciple of Democritus (the famous phrase “man is the measure of all things”), Thrasymachus, the main figure in the beginning of Plato’s Republic, argued that “justice would be only the advantage of stronger”, and Gorgias, who is not considered a sophist by Socrates, creates a controversy with Parmenides (being is and non-being is not), according to this “sophist” one cannot communicate what is not known.
Two criticisms can be considered fundamental to the sophists, creating relative truths and this has a strong relationship with modern narratives, and the fact that they considered that virtues were not things that could be taught, thus dismissing moral values.
They, however, did not ignore the questions of the “soul” (what idealism calls subjectivity) in Gorgias’ speech we can read:
“[T]here is the same relationship between the power of speech and the disposition of the soul, the device of drugs and the nature of bodies: just as such a drug causes such a mood to leave the body, and that some cause illness to cease, others life, so Also, among the speeches, some afflict, others enchant, make fear, inflame the listeners, and some, due to some bad persuasion, drug the soul and bewitch it.”
Modern sophists go beyond disregarding the soul, as they praise drugs, drunkenness and temporal pleasures, education for citizenship and replaced by pure ideologisms, today little thought out and organized, are vague promises of a better future.
Thus the logic of power is inverted, Thrasymachus’s “strongest” speech makes sense again, the lack of reasonable moral values has been extinguished in exchange for momentary and fleeting happiness, and rhetoric and oratory are used to convince of many, but true moral discourse says: “the last will be first and the first will be last” (Mt 19:30) because this logic only leads to destruction and empty promises.
Plato. A república (The republic). Trans. And notes Maria da Rocha Pereira, 9th. ed. Colouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, s/d.
Build a life and not exclude
30
Jul
Both Nietzsche in The Gay Science and Peter
Sloterdijk’s Post-God stated the death of God, in fact it is just an attempt to kill God, because if he does not exist we cannot kill him and if he exists he is immortal, so we can only just erase it from our mind temporarily as it will come back intuitively, the proof is that atheists do not ignore Him.
Nietzsche’s text is clear, but it was also distorted: “The mad man threw himself into their midst and pierced them with his gaze. ‘Where has God gone’, he shouted, ‘I will tell you now! We killed him – you and me. We are all your killers! But how did we do this? How do we manage to drink the sea entirely? Who gave us the sponge to erase the horizon? What did we do, untying the earth from its sun? Where are you moving now? Where do we move? Away from all the suns?” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, § 125)
Thus, not being able to kill him, they destroy his “symbolic” values, such as the Holy Supper in the Olympics, for example, or distorting the true history of the God-man: Jesus, as did the idealist theology of Ludwig Feuerbach that we recently posted, created an “absolute” empty and abstract, which cannot be God as a trinitarian person.
However, the reaction to the Hegelian Theocide, that of Feuerbach, in which God only exists in the mind and thus is something of ideal thought and only with idealistic “transcendence” do we reach him, there is the religious reaction of closing oneself in the “community of the elect” , of God’s favorites, those chosen by criteria that a certain community determines and the rest are lepers, public sinners and unworthy of the “kingdom”, bad seed.
The parable of the tares and the wheat is clear, both are born in the same environment, but one does not bear fruit, will not participate in the wheat harvest and will be separated like chaff.
In a way, the reaction to this elevated God, distant from men, “all powerful” is nothing more than a vision of power that is also mundane and temporary and a form of despiritualized asceticism, the life of “exercises” as advocated by Peter Sloterdijk.
Spiritual truth is one in which everyone is included, there is unity and respect for all and no one is seen as a leper or bad seed, this is a Pharisaic interpretation, but it is clear that good seed bears good fruit so one can look at reality in its own way. back, but without prejudiced or exclusionary judgment.
Founded on perfectionism and extreme moralism, morality is important and should not be denied, however, taken to the extreme it makes “addiction” much closer and more likely to fall into it, that is, they are in fact false moralists because they are unable to put into practice what they defend, and it is these false exercises that lead to a practice of deviations and moral aberrations.
The union of these concepts with true humanism, one whose inspiration is divine, cannot and should not lead to attitudes of exclusion, isolation and lack of charity.
Everything has to be thought of in a balanced way, from politics to religiosity, from family to social life, from social action to contemplation.
Wisdom and simplicity
17
Jul
Among the various contemporary narratives,
one of the most absurd is the praise of ignorance as if it were an ally of simplicity and humility, from the “cultural” to the religious world this is transformed into narratives: he did not attend college, he did not read a book, did not walk among wise men, etc. Do not confuse this with the ability to live simply and among simple people.
It’s not a sign of the times, it’s not “generational”, it’s just a lack of interest in true asceticism, in an inner and outer growth that gives your human nature that something more that is the only thing capable of removing depression, anguish, anxieties and other illnesses. current.
The wise man is an observer, and observes not only the everyday scenes, those that different types of people live in, especially the simplest ones, but also the one who searches in the history of humanity for those peaks of civilizational moments that made us more people, more human. and more supportively, there are many examples, authors and people who gave us this.
We posted yesterday about fresh water and hot food, but in several regions this has interesting contours and cultural aspects, for example, in many countries there is no breakfast, an African told me, in Portugal there is breakfast which is a breakfast. simple morning, and in Brazil what is called breakfast is actually a small lunch.
What to read beyond is of course your personal belief, read the Bible, the Quran, the Vedas or what is sacred or culturally read in a certain culture, the red book in China for example, the second most read book in Brazil is The little prince, although Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist is 5th. in the world, but Iliad and Odyssey are still little read, King Lear and Othello by William Shakespeare are increasingly less known.
Of course, wisdom does not mean literary culture, but far from it it also becomes narrative in the sense that it ignores cultural history, the modern model of the novel is present throughout Western culture, and Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert are representatives for different tastes, but even for social criticism they should be read.
Someone can launch the philosophical argument, it is an entire Eurocentric culture, true, but it has been incorporated into everyday thoughts, nationalism through national colors is all over the world, freedom of expression, as the romantic Victor Hugo (Les Misarables (photo), in my opinion, the best of romantics said: “Not even a rule, nor models” is also an expression of individualism and personal heroism, but historical.
We made several posts about being, interiority and the complement of Contemplative Life with Active Life (Hannah Arendt and Byung-Chul Han in particular), about the methodology of the hermeneutic circle where we must listen to the text (and also the dialogues) for fusion of horizons and also the disaster of our Western culture and the need for resistance of the spirit.
Unveil and future
05
Jul
A large part of the future perspectives that are
not within the scope of civilizational advancement, in addition to including wars and hostilities, rely on revelations, whose etymology of the word comes from re-veiling, which means taking off the veil and replacing another, thus as a rule are obscure.
It is not only on the religious level, but also in philosophy, where the last great oracle and prophet was John the Baptist, after all he was the one who announced the greatest of all prophecies: the birth of Jesus, it does not mean, of course, that in this field there is no no matter what is new, God is always new and creative.
The word unveil in philosophy comes from the search for truth, Heidegger and other philosophers take it from a-letheia (a is not and lethe – forget), to modify the concept of what is true in Being and Time (written in 1927), states in paragraph 44 which understands unveiling as an event that removes entities from the veil.
A prior understanding that frees man’s orientation towards objects (the question of subjectivity x objectivity) favors interpretation (Auslegung), that is, the articulation with what was previously understood, and thus remakes it from the perspective of new horizons.
Discourse, in the correct sense of the narration, is later and consists of a basic activity of what is human, connecting and living with others, it gives man a common understanding and in addition to speech and shared opinions, it creates a fusion of horizons , a narration.
We have already posted here the issue of the Narration Crisis, especially the book by Byung-Chul Han, so the man projected onto objects and actions creates narratives and is unable to clearly reveal reality, it is necessary, using a metaphor, to change the glasses.
So if there are true revelations, they are hidden from today’s futurologists, they reveal much more an anguish about the future than an unveiling of the future.
In the biblical passage that Jesus has difficulty revealing himself to his contemporaries (Mk 6,4), he encounters difficulties even among those closest to him and family members, so to speak, the religious people closest to him in his time and something similar occurs today.
Heidegger, M. (2021) Being and Time. Transl. John MacQuarrie, Edward S. Robingon, UK: Must Have Books.
The liquid visionaries
03
Jul
Analyzing Dilthey’s “romantic” vision of history,
Hans-Georg Gadamer first emphasizes his rightness that “what we call the meaning of life is constituted, many times before any scientific objectification, within a natural vision of life about itself ” (GADAMER, 2006, p. 31).
However, he will criticize Dilthey, that “every expression of life implies a knowledge that forms it from within”, and returning to the analysis from Hegel, he questions his vision of an objective spirit, if the “ethical environment in which he lives and the which he shares with others constitutes something “solid” that allows him to orient himself despite the somewhat vague contingencies of his subjective élans” (Gadamer, 2006, p. 32), the emphasis on the solid was made by the author.
The author remembers Dilthey’s “Investigating solid forms” (one of the themes of the Collection of Writings), which implies that both contemplation and reflection “always imply practical experience”, then contests Gadamer: “in Dilthey’s eyes, the objectivity of scientific knowledge, no less than the meditative reflection of philosophy, is an unfolding of the natural tendencies of life” (GADAMER, 2006, pp. 32).
In the same collection, recalls Gadamer, Dilthey said that “our task… will be to explain how the relative values of an era can acquire a somehow absolute dimension” and despite being a concern with the absolute, the path between relativism and totality is quite another, since Dilthey’s “being consciously a conditioned being” is not an explicit critique of idealism.
All this philosophy, says Gadamer, starts from a certain intellectualism, I would say, from a “liquid” visionary and points to an “intellectualist motivation of the objection to relativism, an intellectualism incompatible not only with the ultimate implication of his philosophy of life, but also with the starting point chosen by him, that is, the immanence of knowledge in life itself” (GADAMER, 2006, p. 36).
It clarifies Dilthey’s point of view “which demands that his philosophy extends to all domains in which “consciousness, through a reflective and doubtful attitude, finds itself freed from the dominance of authoritarian dogmas and aspires to true knowledge” ‘ (Gadamer, 2006, p. 34) quoting Dilthey himself in quotation marks, from his Collection of Writings.
The questions of the spirit in Hegelian philosophy always remained in the vague concept of the absolute, and never understood the question of contemplation, of a knowledge beyond, its transcendence is that which goes from the subject to the object without any divine or superior plan.
This was Thomas’ dilemma in carrying out the experience, although he lived with Jesus after his death, he was unable to maintain his conviction and needed to touch the master’s wounds.
GADAMER, H-G. The problem of historical consciousness. Trans. Paulo Cesar Duque Estrada. RJ: Rio de Janeiro: FGV, 2006.
