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Arquivo para a ‘Método e Verdade Científica’ Categoria

Friendship and concepts

20 Jul

We have already posted and explored the concepts of friendship in Aristotle for pleasure, for interest and true friendships, we also highlight the difference between the partner and the neighbor (Paul Ricoeur’s text) where in the first case there is only interest and once the friendship is over closes or diminishes.
What we want to explore a little bit now is what it means in an individualistic world and where interest reigns, what is the concepts of friendship and friend.
In another perspective, in which Deleuze and Guattari go so far as to say that the friend and friendship are “absent” concerns in philosophical thought, and the book “A friendship de Maurice Blachot” is mentioned as a rare exception, but there is already at the base of this discourse a clear distinction between friend and friendship.
So the philosopher is a “friend” of wisdom (philos-friend and sophia-wisdom), but there is a compulsory obligation due to “friendship” being the object of this relationship, and thus only these friends could participate in the friendship, that is, there is a requirement of wisdom.
The basis of this concept is in the “gaze” of a so-called “sage”, so they are concepts within each one, they are the eyes or look of each one on another person, but this look is a sensation that does not come from the eyes of the senses or of personal feelings, so they are a nobody’s gaze, a demand for observation, a selfie that must be seen by another.
But how can you be a friend while being nobody? This question makes more sense when it comes to a dimension in a highly differentiable plane, and thus it can be seen in certain historical, political and even religious contexts, where each thinker is taken individually as having a “look” of sage, or of pretended wisdom.
One can illustrate with Guattari and Deleuze himself, and thus we can divide friendship into concepts of different contexts: the Greek, the Nietzschean, the Heideggerian and the Focaultian.
Such an inquiry aims to explore the territory of friendship as a concept, because if, as we said, it is a highly differentiable dimension or plane, then it can be detected in certain historical periods or even in each thinker taken individually. We will then try to define and illustrate, from the elements that we have just lent to Deleuze and Guattari, in a way appropriate to the extension of this article, four types of friendship of the concept, the Greek, the Nietzschean, the Heideggerian and the Foucaultian, but it’s just a rhetorical exercise.
It can be worthwhile as an exercise in thought, friendship is simple and there can be, and there are, among simple people with little book culture, and there may not be among “cults”.
I venture to say that there is more true friendship between simple people, than Heidegger says in his Forest Path in which he lives with very simple people.

 

Conscience, truth and clearing

08 Jul

Consciousness can be classified in different ways, but it is far from the whole to which the entity belongs (identified as material reality in modernity) it forgets being, thus what in fact is consciousness remains hidden and is closer to the sentience to which it is refer to artificial intelligence and what could be called machinic consciousness.

The clearing that emerges from being, already posted here, is the one that is contained in the context of a whole, and from it emerges the being, and this criticism can be extended to all modernity, where there is a fragmentation and everything refers to the part, often even opposed to the whole to which the entity belongs, and from it emerges the question of being, as Heidegger intended.

This whole is also claimed by Edgar Morin, who is 101 years old today, and together with Lima de Freitas and Barsarab Nicolescu, writing in Arrábida’s “Letter of Transdisciplinarity” (1994) as “the contemporary rupture between an increasingly accumulation and an increasingly impoverished inner being leads to the rise of a new obscurantism, whose consequences on the individual and social plane are incalculable” (Arrábida, 1994).

This type of formal consciousness also takes a notion not only of knowledge, but also of culture and even religion, to a deviation away from the clearing of Being and subject to formal rules and precepts, of Law and knowledge in an apparently rigorous but inhumane logic. and that hides the Being.

In culture, it means limiting the conception to a particular type of culture, of a single worldview, which is valid, but which cannot be imposed on other worldviews, especially the original ones.

For Christians, the biblical passage that clarifies this false consciousness is that Jesus is questioned by a master of the Law, specialists in formal consciousness, asks the master what he needs to do to conquer the divine kingdom, and Jesus says in modern language respect the Other and admits the Divine Being par excellence, the one who is the All in a monotheistic worldview (God).

However, the parable of the Good Samaritan is told immediately afterwards and makes the formal conscience clear, the parable says that a man was robbed and mistreated by robbing and he stood by the wayside, a priest and a Levite passed by (a tribe from which religious came from that time) and turned away from the problem, a Samaritan passed by (who was a people without religion and who did not like the Jews) and offered help, put oil and wine on the wounds, put it on his animal and took him to a pension paying his stay. and if it lasted longer, I would pay on the way back.

Only the Samaritan had an attitude of true conscience towards man, so Jesus told those who asked how to conquer the divine kingdom “Go and do likewise” (Mt 10:37).

Heidegger e a clareira « Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura (marcosmucheroni.pro.br)

 

 

Controversy of the conscious machine and some daydreams

06 Jul

Before any controversy, it is important to understand that the issue of ethics is present in all serious AI (Artificial Intelligence) teams and since the conference in Sweden, several companies and research centers have signed an agreement not to develop lethal machines in AI.

Jean-Gabriel Ganascia has written an important book on the Myth of the Singularity, the point at which the machine would surpass human intelligence and he himself has an ethics section in his lab, as many teams have, including Google.

A recent controversy arose from an interview with Google engineer Blake Lemoine to the Washington Post and having defined the search giant’s AI machine LaMDA as having sentience, Google immediately dismissed it and through its spokesman Brian Gabriel reported that the Blake’s concerns were not “in line with our AI principles and informed him that the evidence does not support his claims”, but the controversy continued.

The first thing to clarify is that sentience has a big difference from consciousness, which means that “perceiving through the senses [in the case of sensing machines [or having impressions, as consciousness there are several definitions, but we are left with that of phenomenology which states that only whether one can speak of consciousness of something, so it depends on the phenomenon and on the intention.

Also for phenomenology, especially for the ontology of Heidegger, his direct descendant (Heidegger was a student of Husserl), Being is described as the abode of language, but one cannot forget that language for Heidegger has a poetic function, that is, in a broader sense than everyday life.

Returning to the sense of sensors, we now have an evolution of the IoT (Internet of Things), one can think of facial expressions, gestures and attitudes that can identify the sentience of a machine, but the awareness of something also means for Heidegger, to reveal the hidden, that which leads us to a clearing of the object or phenomenon, the verification of its ex-sistence, its Being.

Without appealing to philosophy, returning to everyday life, it is possible for a human behavior that emits and develops like a machine, a robotization of our actions, which is also very common in modernity, a “sameness”, poetic language, art and culture comes to the rescue.

As for the technical aspect, it is desirable to know more in depth, while the social aspect cannot fail to observe important technical aspects and their limits, of course, including ethical ones.

For those who want technical details, I recommend Melanie Mitchell’s interview with Zeeshan Aleem: Did a Google create a sentient program ?, there’s a lot of fantasy and fiction out there.

 

 

Anthropotechnics and the two forms of domination

30 Jun

If there is a close relationship between Sloterdijk’s thought and Heidegger and some parallel with the thought of Hans Georg Gadamer, the link between German thought and names such as Ernst Cassieer, Max Scheler, Arnold Gehler and Hellmuth Plessner leads us both to a philosophical anthropology and to the returns to an almost forgotten perspective of the “sciences of the spirit”.

Of these authors, some very close to the Nazi projects, he takes advantage of the idea of ​​man as a deficient being, who does not have natural means (claws, teeth or horns, for example) to defend himself and must seek in artificial means, but does not differentiate them from “spiritual” means

It is not by chance that his work draws parallels with Nietzsche’s “Dead God”, the criticism of Heidegger’s humanism, but his work seeks an original anthropogenesis, and his anthropotechnics are inserted in it, especially what is written in “You have to change your life. ” where he differentiates two forms of artificial production of human behavior that have flourished since antiquity in the so-called “high cultures”, undergoing a profound transformation in modernity, the first is the production of some men by other men, which he calls techniques of “leaving -se operate”, while the second is the production of men from themselves, which would then be the “autos” – the techniques of Operation” (Sloterdijk, 2009).

On these two types of anthropotechnics, he proposes to rethink, on a basis of philosophical anthropology, the Foucauldian concepts of “biopolitics” and “aesthetics of existence”, with similar ideas in these two poles, the domestication of the other, hence his idea of ​​the human park, and self-colonization, which his disciple Byung-Chul Han will call self-exploitation.

Sloterdijk’s basic difference is the idea of ​​”Improvement of the world” (Weltverbesserung) based on the improvement of populations that dominates Western theory since Plato is exchanged for a “improvement of the self” (Selbsverbesserung) and does so with the “technologies of the self”, and for this men do it as a “society of exercises”.

For Byung-Chul Han, these exercises are controlled by technologies of the “self” that each time refer to psychological exercises, and so he calls it “psychopolitics”, since they believe that it is self-realization that transforms their lives, although they practice a “self-exploitation”.

Both Foucault, Sloterdijk and Byung Chul Han, and this is at the origin of Nietzsche’s thought, that the emergence of ascetic practices provoked an anthropogenesis that divided humans into two categories: the virtuous and the non-virtuous, while in the exercise society, there is an unskilled asceticism.

É Chul Han draws attention to the categories of active life and contemplative life, based on the thoughts of Hannah Arendt and Saint Gregory of Nazianzo (or Nazianzen), Sloterdijk is stuck in his criticism of Scheler, who sees only the person as “ something” besides his acts, and in this he sees a “spirit”.

SLOTERDIJK, P. (2018) Tens de mudar sua vida. Lisboa: Relógio d´Água.

 

 

Being, clearing and humanism

29 Jun

In the context in which Heidegger wrote Being and Time, it is what remains hidden within a whole, where being should emerge, this is appropriate to the discourse of modernity where there is a reduction to human material life, and a division between what it is subjective and objective in Being.

This fragmentation emerges only in one part, most of the time it is opposite to the entity to which the being belongs, explaining in a different way, making a joke: “the being of the entity”.

Being and being are intertwined, being is conditioned by being, since it has a broader sense, this broader definition Heidegger defined as Dasein, or being-there to say this fact that there is a cosmovision of being in relation to a context broader scope of your experience.

However, far from a solution to the paradox of modernity, what Heidegger called the manifestation of being through language, including poetics as one of the functions of language, making there an abode of being, which would preserve the ex-tactician naming in the clearing.

The clearing would be nothing more than the truth of being, that is, it would remove us from the abyss of our ex-sistent essence, and the clearing would give us back the “world” and language is the advent that reveals and clears up being itself, but Sloterdijk responding to its clearing in Heidegger’s Letters for Humanism, he makes an answer in the book Rules for the Human Park, saying of the failure of this clearing and of humanism.

This clearing is neither the habitat nor the environment, and this one finds itself in rupture with nature, where it identifies the failure of the human being as a shepherd of the being, whose essence would not be to take care of the sick, but to keep his flock in the clearing, the clearing is the open world and, in this case, the task is used in the being freely chosen and impregnating itself with the being itself.

Before advancing in the criticism, it is necessary to emphasize Sloterdijk’s praise of Heidegger, there is a praise of his criticism of Humanism, reconceptualizing it and seeking the essence of man in this system.

Sloterdijk’s starting point is Heidegger’s critique, where he seeks a better understanding of what man is within this humanism, and a greater understanding of the clearing.

Subjectivity is no longer a mere grammatical fundamental and becomes a foundation as a human representation, whether of its feelings or its essence, and of man in this system.

Sloterdijk’s starting point is Heidegger’s critique, where he seeks a better understanding of what man is within this humanism, and a greater understanding of the clearing.

Subjectivity is no longer a mere grammatical fundamental and becomes a foundation as a human representation, whether of its feelings or its essence, and thus the foundation becomes the self, thus modernity opens an object-subject relationship.

Everything, then, is for man, it is anthropocentric and the world opens up to domination, for science and technique to dominate it, grounding all knowledge, but what is the knowledge about Being.

By exchanging this vocabulary from humanism to his own (subjectivity) Heidegger states, according to Sloterdijk, that the school of domestication of man, which is really a school, the pedagogical project initiated by the Romans, is a failed school, domestication was not possible.

Two of Sloterdijk’s successes are an astonishment for the future of civilization, first a positive necessity that is co-immunity, the idea that only a joint defense of the Being overcomes the self, the other dangerous is that the domestication project has failed and the clearing is an imperative, not just a humanist narrative.

Sloterdijk says textually: “the history of the clearing cannot be developed only as a narrative of the arrival of human beings to the houses of languages” and from there he elaborates his anthropotechnics, will be our next topic.

SLOTERDIJK, P. (2000) Regras para o parque humano. (in portuguese) Trad. José Oscar de Almeida Marques, Brazil, São Paulo: Estação Liberdade.

 

The being between the break and the way

24 Jun

Two sentences of Heidegger’s well reflect his essential questions that make more sense in moments of deep crisis: “We must raise again the question of the meaning of being” and “The human being is an ontologically privileged entity because in its existence its own is at stake”. being.” (in ‘Being and time’), then the path must start from a contemplative pause.

The agenda is also a moment for the opening of being and an epoché about the meaning of existing, with other men, within a historical and solidary context with nature that is the “house” where it lives, while language is the abode of the human being. To be.

This requires a desert, a change of mentality, leaving the Fatigue Society, facing the pain and risks of a pandemic with another vision (Byung Chul Han wrote the Palliative Society) and finally finding peace in a new way, breaking with the structures of evil.

Only those who have passed through the desert, through the “valley of shadows”, which are now not exclusive to a single Being, but are shadows over the civilizing process around the world, including the possibility of war, hunger and an endless pandemic if we don’t change the posture.

The biblical story tells John the Baptist who went to the desert and announced a new time, which Christians celebrate his birth these days, Jesus also went to the desert where he was tempted and experienced hunger being fed by “angels”, and humanity as will cross your desert

To follow the path it is necessary to go through these questions, answer these questions, as the biblical passage says in (Lk 9, 20), Jesus after being rejected in Samaria and preventing the apostles from coming into conflict with that people, says to the having a disciple who wanted to bury his father: “Let the dead bury their dead, but you, go and announce the kingdom of God”.

This means that we should not look at what is dying, but at what is being born in the middle of the desert, because that is where a new path begins.

 

 

The path and being

23 Jun

Even if I have read Heidegger, few have read at least in its entirety O ser e o tempo, or another work that I consider important The origin of the work of art, and the most controversial (at least currently) that is Letters on Humanism, not only because Sloterdijk rejected it, but because thinking about what humanism is today is the most important task in trying to save civilization.

Just look around, from the pandemic to war, the extreme and sometimes irrational political politicization, and not only all of this, but especially the sharp look and thinking that saw beyond appearances.

There are two good biographies of Heidegger, one by Hugo Ott, which I read in pieces and another that I read and passed on to so many friends, which is Rudiger Safranski’s, both deserve to be read and are not Heidegger.

On the way through the forest, the time that Heidegger spent around the fire, where he smoked his pipe with the peasants and woodsmen of the Black Forest, it is said that in silence, perhaps it says more about Heidegger than his philosophy, says something of the poetry he did not write. , but lived.

It was there in an interview that Heidegger gave to Der Spiegel that he said (not in a religious tone but in a tone of disbelief) he said the phrase: “Only a God can save us”, and he was right.

The rustic and simple hut that Heidegger inhabited during the time he wrote Being and Time, was also his refuge in the time of the Forest Path, and of a short little-known writing that “Creative Landscape: why we perpass in the province”, that it is not a compliment to the province, but the need for a contemplation that urban life had lost, a path similar to the one that a younger philosopher Byung-Chul Han wrote in The Society of Fatigue.

It is written in “Creative Landscape”: “The city dweller thinks he “mingles with the people” as soon as he deigns to have a long conversation with a peasant. At night, on a break from work, when I sit by the fire with the peasants, or at the table in the Herrgott swinkel, then most of the time we don’t say anything. We smoke our pipes in silence”, the note clarifies that Herrgottswinkel is an establishment in the countryside.

So it’s not isolation or provincialism, but a pause to get back on track.

 

HEIDEGGER, M. (2014) Paisagem Criativa: Por que permanecemos na província , in: Idéia. Campinas (SP)|n. 9.  

 

 

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.

 

 

Being and Contemplation

16 Jun

The thinker Byung-Chul Han developed the themes of Hannah Arendt Vita Activa and Vita Contemplativa in his book “A society of Bournout”, where he reveals that “the loss of the contemplative capacity is in correspondence with the absolutization of the vita activa – which measure to the hysteria and nervousness of the modern society of action”, and this leads to tiredness, depression, self-exploitation and Burnout.

According to the Korean-German thinker, current life has led to the “imperative of work, which degrades the person into animal laborans”, which makes him lose the “world” and “time”. new “the contemplative vita in your bosom” and “put yourself at your service again” (O Aroma do tempo. A philosophical essay on the art of delay, 2009).

Despite this loss, there is a renewed interest in spirituality in Western civilization, but it does not consider traditional religions more important, which occurs in the sphere of a phenomenon called “mindfulness”, linked to neurosciences and in health care, education and business.

There is no deeper meaning in this relationship that reaches the divine, the superhuman or the beyond-human, it turns to what Peter Sloterdijk calls “the exercise society”, without the possibility of a true spirituality, or a despiritualized asceticism.

Hannah Arendt had touched on the problem lightly, it must be remembered that her thesis was on “Love in St. Augustin” without the help of the divine it does so without success, it remains hidden.

“With the title Vita contemplativa, that world in which it was originally located should not be reconjured. It is linked to that experience of being, according to which the beautiful and the perfect is Immutable and Imperishable and withdraws from any and all human use” (HAN, p. 35), although for the author the contemplative capacity is not necessarily linked to the imperishable Being (p. 36).

The concept of what the soul is was treated by Saint Justin, in the second century of the Christian era, before becoming a Christian he had approached the Stoics, but they did not consider it important to know God, then he approached the Pythagoreans and had to dedicate himself to numbers and music, and finally it was Plato’s disciples who thought as much about corporeal things as about ideas, but the key problem that distanced him was the question of the “soul” and is in his “Dialogue with Trypho”.

For older Christians (Catholic, Orthodox and Eastern) Eucharistic Adoration is the greatest contemplation, because God makes himself a piece of bread, a consecrated host.

 

Han, Byung-Chul Sociedade do cansaço. tradução de Enio Paulo Giachini. – Petropolis, RJ: Vozes, 2015.

 

Being and action

15 Jun

Being is not inactivity, because it is being that determines its action, but the pure project on action empties being, it is activism or “vita activa”, the one that Husserl, Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and more recently Byung Chul Han question about the absence of vita contemplativa, the interior.

It is not about subjectivity, because it is precisely the separation between objective and subjective being that is the first great impulse for the emptying of being, it is not also about the social being, it is what is projected in man’s consciousness, in the intention that it directs to the object, to the external life.

The “vita activa” (life in action) was thus expressed by Hanna Arendt: “The expression vita activa, comprising all human activities and defined from the point of view of the absolute stillness of contemplation, therefore corresponds more to the Greek askholia (occupation, restlessness) with which Aristotle [defines] all activity, which the bio politikos of the Greeks. The expression vita activa is permeated and overloaded with tradition. It is as old as our tradition of political thought, but no older than it. The expression itself, which in medieval philosophy is the consecrated translation of Aristotle’s bios politikos, already occurs in Augustine where, as vita negotiosa or actuosa, it still reflects its original meaning: a life dedicated to public and political affairs” (Arendt, 2007, p.23), in this explanation by Arendt there is also a complete translation of the political animal.

What action is for Arendt, is not that of activism or voluntarism, but that which takes place “between” men, depends on intersubjectivity (the relationship of interiorities), which she says thus: “the end, the last of the elements of vita activa addressed by Arendt is action. Action is the element of interpersonality and the environment of intersubjectivity, that is, it occurs between men. Therefore, because it is developed between people, the action is observed in a prominent way from labor and work, such elements do not influence it.

So what considers the human condition of action is plurality, he says textually: “Considering that action is an activity of free men in the public sphere, it is an expression of human plurality. Its realization depends on the coexistence between different individuals. However, since action requires an interactive diversity, it particularizes men. It promotes the appearance of individualities and enables the construction of identities. Now, man will never be able to manifest his uniqueness in isolation. Nobody shows what it is in the personal sphere of intimacy. Only when he is with others can man reveal what he is” (ARENDT, 2007, p.189).

But Hannah Arendt considers modernity in crisis only from the beginning of totalitarianism and the events of the two world wars, and in our view the problem already arises in rationalist/idealist thinking.

ARENDT, Hannah. (2007) A condição Humana. (The Human Condition). 10th ed. Rio de Janeiro:  ed. Forense Universitária. .