Arquivo para a ‘Método e Verdade Científica’ Categoria
The ineffable and the interpretation
23
Jul
Before making today’s post, we can’t fail to register the 
Tokyo Olympics, whose opening takes place today and some protests: five teams: United States, Sweden, Chile, New Zealand and, surprisingly, the United Kingdom, knelt before their football matches in anti-racist protest, Australia’s women’s players have embraced, remembering the Aboriginal nation that lives there and signifying national unity.
But perhaps the most important demonstration was relegated to the background, the protesters are called “ultranationalists”, which is not true, as 43% of the population was in favor of postponing the Olympics, 40% were against it and only 14% are favorable.
The Pandemic was ineffable and it is there still showing signs of resistance despite the struggle of science for vaccines and their overcoming, exactly the most resilient people did not renounce an event, and this is also of course a problem of interpretation of what actually occurs right now.
Something ineffable that is not subject to interpretation and even metaphors would be little to try to explain them are the great questions of humanity: what we are in the universe, where we are going and now more than ever: where we are going.
There are many cosmogonies that try to give an eschatological interpretation to these issues, what is certain is that we exist and not because we think (I think, therefore I am), but we exist and this allows us to think and language (I am, therefore I think) and with it interpretation is possible.
Christian cosmogony, there are many others in different cultures, is the one whose metaphor of the seed grain transforms into life: the seed that falls among thorns, that falls on shallow soil and that falls by the wayside, the good soil will make it germinate and bear fruit, is an interpretation of the ineffable.
The biblical text of the multiplication of the loaves, whose earthly interpretation only sees the distribution of goods (Mk 6,1-15), does not observe the ineffable interpretation because it is Jesus who asks Philip (Mk 6,5): “Jesus told Philip : “Where are we going to buy bread so they can eat?”, and after multiplying the 5 barley loaves and two fish.
The ineffable divine, men wanted to give him an earthly power and the reading says (Mk 6,15) : “But when he noticed that they were trying to take him to proclaim him king, Jesus withdrew again, alone, to the mountain.”, is a divine interpretation made by the Master himself.
Language beyond logic
21
Jul
In the entire history of philosophy and even science, there
are three concepts that surpass in many aspects the concepts of logic, among them, the truth, the good and the justice are the most common, already in
Plato go beyond being logical principles, they embody cosmological principles and as such must resort to metaphysics, analogy and metaphor.
Thus, in Book VI of the Republic, the great metaphysical analogy falls on the idea of good, homonymous to justice and truth: the sun is the son and progeny of good itself, and is still its visible analogue, there it is placed in the shadows of shapes in the cave, the contrast with the real and perfect world of shapes and the analogy of the sun to “lighten” objects.
In the absence of knowledge, they confuse mere shadows with reality, and philosophy is for Plato the pedagogical bridge that serves to pass from complete obscurity to the light of knowledge.
The use of language can also be only logical, in the 1930s, Wittgenstein said that as we know that in language there are only propositions, and surprises only occur in the world, so there are no surprises in mathematics: mathematics is totally “grammatical”, right -se-ia today is just syntactic.
In the context of semantics, and of meaning, language acquires other properties and in them that the metaphor makes sense, when saying José is brave as a lion, the analogy serves to increase what it means brave, giving new semantics to the syntax: José is very angry.
But the metaphor is also contextual, the beautiful poem by Fernando Pessoa “The poet is a pretender” is only understood if we know that “rope train” refers to a child’s play in the 20s and 30s of the last century and that “wheel rails” refer to the tracks, there:
And so on the wheel rails
It turns, to entertain the reason,
that rope train
Which is called the heart.
There is also the penetration of the metaphor into the mystery, the ineffable as we have already posted, and being able to affirm it.
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.
Accelerated vaccination and new concerns
19
Jul
Vaccination accelerated in July as was the optimistic
expectation, the fall in infections and deaths is still very slow and the new waves of infection in countries in the region such as Chile and Argentina light a warning sign, Peru was already in high numbers and some countries in Europe, such as Russia, also show that the Epidemic is far from over.
Argentina reached on Wednesday (14/7) the symbolic mark of 100,000 deaths, high for a population of 44.5 million inhabitants, and entered a new lockdown, with results already containing the new high, the numbers in week fell again.
Brazil like Argentina reaches the number of vaccinated 16% and 11% respectively, while the first dose in Brazil reaches 44.5% and Argentina 45% (see chart above), the next numbers suggest greater attention to the possibility of a new ascending curve, it would be a greater expansion of the delta variant, climatic factors (Chile and Argentina are colder) or even a variant called lambda , and the effectiveness of the Russian Sputnik is questioned.
The lambda variant detected in Peru is frightening, called C.37, its preliminary studies indicate greater lethality and the ability to circumvent vaccines is serious. Researcher Pablo Tsukayama, coordinator of the Microbial Genetics laboratory at the Cayetano Heredia de Lima University, detected that the variant it is already 100% of the infected cases in Peru as of April 2021.
The lack of open data hinders the research, the Ministry of Health of Peru does not disclose it and Professor Tsukayama is one of those protesting this lack of access.
Another issue of concern is the lack of scientific data on the effectiveness of vaccination for the new variants, there are many people who make statements trying to compromise, but do not present clear scientific studies, for example, on new variants such as lambda.
One of these studies, reported by the newspaper El País on July 11, is by Chilean virology Ricardo Soto Rifo, who focused on the CoronaVac vaccine, the main one used in Chile, in a group of volunteer health workers who discovered that lambda presents “increased capacity for infection and immune escape against neutralizing antibodies”, the extent of such loss remains to be clarified.
Another study pointing out in El País is that of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine, from the University of New York, pointing out that the results were “relatively lower”, but Professor Tsukayma makes a less than encouraging observation: “It is practically impossible to predict how a virus will suffer mutation”, but reducing transmission is possible through vaccines and this is effective.
Interiority and the social relationship
16
Jul
If today’s society “isolates” the individual, and the pandemic 
has done so in greater depth, this does not mean that some isolation is not necessary in an increasingly hectic urban life.
The cultural drama of our time is when “it presupposes exactly the non-satisfaction (by oppression, repression or some other means) of powerful instincts explained Freud (see the post on Civilization and its Discontents), he exposes this as a “cultural frustration ” that dominates the field of social relationships between human beings, but Byung Chul Hang goes deeper when analyzing what pain is.
Byung-Chul Han’s new book “The Palliative Society” will describe the medieval society as the society of martyrdom in the face of pain, and the current one as the Survival Society, and because of the attempt to avoid pain, as a Palliative Society, so many antidepressants, anxiolytics and “analgesics, prescribed en masse, hide relationships that lead to pain” (Han, 2021, p.29).
In a curious analysis for a Buddhist, but perhaps aware that Easter means a “passage” through pain to eternal life, the author describes: “in view of the pandemic, the survival society even prohibits the Easter Mass. Also priests practically “social distancing” and wear protective masks. They sacrifice faith entirely to survival… Virology espouses theology.” (Han, 2021, p. 35).
Everyone listens to the virologists, says the author, the beautiful narrative of the resurrection “gives place entirely to the ideology of health and survival” (Han, 2021, p. 35), it is not about life but: “Death empties life into survival”.
Using Hegel, the author explains the true meaning of pain: “Pain is the engine of the dialectical formation of the spirit” (p. 75), the formative path is “a painful life: The other, the negative, the contradiction, the split belong, therefore, to the Nature of the spirit” (p. 76) and so interiority.
Jesus, always after some intense moment of preaching or participating in some social event, would leave with the disciples, it was the moment of interiority, but often situations forced him to leave his rest aside and go back to seeing the people (Mk 6 , 31-34):
“He said to them: ‘Come alone to a desert place and rest awhile’… When he disembarked, Jesus saw a large crowd and had compassion, because they were like sheep without a shepherd” and Jesus came back and taught them other things.
He also had moments of pain prior to Easter, when he drank the cup, and little rest.
HAN, Byung-Chul. Sociedade Paliativa: a dor hoje. (Palliative society: pain today). trans. Lucas Machado, Petrópolis: RJ: Ed.Vozes, 2021.
Walking towards a troubled future
13
Jul
Lectures and motivational books have been growing since 
the beginning of the 21st century, it doesn’t matter much the message, the important thing is to lead people to an action force that is performance.
Traditional religions lose adherents to churches that change the discourse of sin for self-help and the desire for recognition and success, political polarization does not leave this aside, a good politician must demonstrate his “deeds” and not his exemption, balance and honesty.
Far from disdaining technological evolution, it is important and can help in a co-immunological resumption, one in which we discover mutuality, the “exam” as described by Byung Chul Han only seeks performance and it can include disrespect and fake- News.
The repressive and disciplinary society of the 20th century described by Michel Foucault (Watch and Punish) loses space to a new form of coercive organization: neuronal violence, fanpages fill up, lives exhibiting performances and even exhibiting violence, which is worrisome.
Interiority, which is different from subjectivity, which is what is proper to the subject, is that internal space that we need to cultivate to make our lives more balanced, with more positive thoughts and actions and that collaborate with mutualism, the feeling of responsibility for the other, the social conscience, finally, the community (the immunological society).
Chul Han points out that subjectivity, already present in discourses of current thinkers, such as “post-industrial society” (Bell, 1999), “control society” (Deleuze, 1992), “cognitive capitalism” or “material economy” (Negri and Lazzarato, 2001, Gorz, 2005) and “biopolitics” (Foucault, 2008) were forms of expression of this subjectivity, however without resorting to interiority.
Society is pushed towards an excess of positivity as Chul Han calls it in his Society of Tiredness, the coercive disciplinary concept (“you shall”) imposed from outside, brought into the scene a new statement (“we can”), which, in its most immanent aspects, “refers to a false freedom by imposing on individuals the imperatives of performance and self-satisfaction.
The author’s analysis starts from the film Black Swan (Aronofsky, 2010) to explain his thesis, the imposition of performance and performance through self-overcoming is incorporated by the protagonist who is taken to the last consequences.
Today’s society of tiredness is nothing more than the unilateral absolutization of “positive power” and cognitive enhancement (neuro-enhancement) may not pose any moral problem, but it will lead to an even greater moral problem in the normativity of the performance society.
Han, Byung Chul. (2015) THE BURNOUT SOCIETY. Translated by ERIK BUTLER stanford briefs. An lmprint of Stanford University Press. Stanford, California.
Fall trend and vaccination in Brazil
12
Jul
According to the consortium of press vehicles, the number
of vaccine doses in Brazil reached 83,794,712 for the first dose, while 28,108,088 for the second, to this value must be added 2,465,295 single doses, for a total of 114.3 million doses applied, it is expected to grow to maintain the declining curve seen in infections and deaths.
In percentages it means 14.4% who have already received either the second dose or Janssen, which is a single dose, while the percentage that received the first dose is close to 40%, this being important to contain the most offensive variants, the delta and the delta plus, which are already in the country.
It should be noted that clinical analyzes indicate that the second dose is needed for the new variant, and a wider range above 60% starts receiving the second dose, but the application of Janssen is the most optimistic because the number of can make the immunization grow.
When will we achieve so-called herd immunity that will allow for the relaxation of protective measures is the question we all want to know, Anthony Fauci, head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, one of the leading physicians in the efforts against covid-19 in there, it estimates that it should reach 70% of the population, but there are others who indicate that it would be 80% to 90%, as the biggest problem is the mutability of the virus.
Japan, which has numbers close to Brazil, 17% for the two doses and above 30% for the first dose, has already announced that there will be no public at the Olympics starting in a week, and the athletes’ trips will be monitored with all measures of protection.
At the pace of vaccination, all precautions are still needed, whenever there has been some relaxation, there has been an increase in cases and deaths, we expect the curve to keep falling.
A Century of Life: Edgar Morin
08
Jul
Today (08/06/2021) the French philosopher, educator,
historian and geographer Edgar Morin, born in Paris as Edgar Nahoum, adopted the code name Morin in the French resistance.
The French newspaper Liberation, published on Thursday (3/06) some excerpts of its new book that will be released this week in France, “lessons of a century of life” (“Leçons d’un siècle de vie”, publisher Denoel), with some excerpts from the book, calling him the grandfather of all Frenchmen.
In the book Morin says that when he is no longer alive, he hopes that people will be able to “love each other and themselves, instead of continuing in this western regression marked by neo-totalitarianism in the making, and he does not fail to mention China.
When the world closes, and the identity issue becomes relevant, as it divides peoples, Morin, reflecting on his own origins, highlighted in his book, according to Liberation: “Everyone has the identity of their family, of their village or city, that of your province or ethnicity, that of your country, and the largest of your continent. Each one has a complex identity, that is, we are unique and at the same time plural”, it is not just a matter of “tolerating” but of “loving” the Other.
He warns that “human history is relatively intelligible a posteriori, but always unpredictable a priori”, recalls the 1929 crisis, the rise of Hitler and Nazism, the disintegration of the former Soviet Union and the attack on the World Trade Center twin towers , his reflections on what he called “Stalinia”, about which, according to Liberation, he wrote in his book: “My stay of six years in the Stalinist universe educated me on the powers of illusion, error and historical lies”.
However, he is far from being thought of as a conservative or even a reformer, he always dreamed of a structural change in humanity, which must start from a change in mentality, thought and culture, and also reflects on populism and religious absolutism.
Let’s wait for the book, as always, it will bring new reflections, perhaps even Morin’s confessions.
In Brasilia, the Center for Sustainable Development of the University of Brasilia (CDS/UnB) in Brasilia will also launch a book with the 15 best articles on Edgar Morin, already selected, in partnership with SESC/SP, supported by the Regional Chair of Complejidad y Condición Humana de la Universidad CLAEH (Uruguay) (the picture used) and EHESS/CNRS where Morin is an emeritus researcher.
At 100 years old, he still reveals a lucidity unrivaled at this age, and a unique vitality and wisdom, Félicitations Morin.
The whole, the part and the Being
02
Jul
It was from this theorization of the whole that Werner Heisenberg
started the quantum principle, when he formulated his theory there was no answer from scientific experience, which in itself already contests empiricism, and it was a “theory” which in itself contests that reality is practical, but it was the first attempt, happy because later Physics and Science would come to their rescue, starting from the whole and not from the parts, as proposed by the Cartesian method.
The truth of physics, however, changes over time, new discoveries about new discoveries of subparticles (among them the Higgs boson), the 7 states of matter (it joins the three widely known, the plasma (light liquid), Bose-Einstein states, fermionic gas and polarations superfluid, and there may be an eighth, so there is already a paraphysics.
But there is already, and there always was, metaphysics (later physics), modernity wanted to reduce it to subjectivity (something proper to the subject, but only stuck in his mind), the current ontology, the result of hermeneutics and phenomenology, it recovers by questioning the “veiling” of being, and proposes a clearing, the crisis of humanism is nothing other than this crisis.
The philosophical question about everything is “because there is everything and not nothing” and this supposes ex-sistence, as the question about the whole could be, it is not asked philosophically but only theologically, if there is “everything” which it is the intention that justifies the ex-sistence of everything ?.
Phenomenology recovers intentionality, a subcategory of consciousness in medieval philosophy, with a sense of being directed at something, or of being about something, thus ontological.
Husserl recovered it by directing it to an object, an essential category in modern idealism, but directing it to something that can be imaginary or real, thus including metaphysics and Being.
So the fantastic thing about the existence of everything is not just its existence, but the intention for the Whole.
What is the whole and if it exists is Being, so only He can Be beyond the whole universe that is locus, since in modern physics time is an abstraction, says Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, who is among the most respected.
F or Christians, the entrance of God into the physis happens with Jesus, says the passage that Jesus asks who they say is “the son of man” (He thus speaks of one of his two natures: divine and human), and he goes to ask the apostles the who they say He is.
The apostles respond (Mt 16:14-16), they replied: “Some say it is John the Baptist; others that it is Elijah; still others, that it is Jeremiah or one of the prophets”. Then Jesus asked them, “And you, who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” and Jesus says he is happy because it was God who revealed him.
Between Being, Nothing and interiority
01
Jul
The first ontological sensation, faced with rationality, was an
attempt to confine Being in its subjectivity (which comes from the subject) in order to make the relationship with the Being an “objectivity” that exists outside of Being (for modernity outside the subject).
As both deny ex-sistence, here it means ex “to leave” and the verb sistere, “to be placed”, so to exist is what is placed outside the being, more than subjectivity is the very essence of Being, beyond of the imaginary and the symbolic, of the imaginary because it is unrepresentable and the symbolic because it means the non-meaning, but there are all essence and existence of Being.
The conception of denying the existence of being, which has to deny even the reason that conceives it, comes from Gorgias (485-380 BC), a sophist whom Plato refuted in a book, for him there was no truth and it can be said that it is the distant principle for relativism.
The existence and reality of Being, although veiled, lies in the possibility of a clearing, on which depends the opening of Dasein, its relationship with the physis (nature in the general sense of the Greeks) and for which the veil that covers the being, and so the relationship with being and interiority.
If we see ourselves only as we see in a mirror, we see the image of our being, if we see as we are, it means that we are able to see beyond it our interiority, our complexity and from them how we relate to the whole of which we are part.
The projection on the exteriority and denial of interiority is part of the emptying of Being in modernity, we are what we do and it doesn’t really matter what we actually are interiorly.
From this emptying, nihilism (nihil – nothing) was born, solipsism (the I and my sensations) and, in a way, subjectivism (considerations only about what is personal, an empty interiority) and a good part of theorizations values in the infernal dichotomies (subject x object) and (nature x culture).
In a more current interpretation, in the Society of Tiredness Byung Chul Han speaks of interiority, in another book The Society of Transparency he states: “today the world is not a theater in which actions and feelings are represented and read, but a market where they are exposed , sells and consumes intimacies” (HAN, 2017, p. 80).
Han, Byung-Chul (2017). Transparency Society. Enio Paulo Giachini. Brazil: Petrópolis, Vozes, 2017.
