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Arquivo para a ‘Calm Technology’ Categoria

Non-things and subjectivity, the distorted eidos

12 Jan

Subjectivity comes from idealism that judges Being separate from things, thus only being if projected onto objects, but the Greek “eidos”, from which nascent idealism came, there was no such separation, both in Aristotle’s 4 causes: material, formal, efficient and final, as well as in the theory of Platonic ideas, which is the essence and which we have already related to the thing.

Those who think the world is immersed in eroticization are mistaken, be it the world of fantasy, that which comes from works of fiction, from children’s imagination and from looking with hope at a better future, today in an increasingly worrying present, Chul- Han writes like this:

“Without fantasy, there is only pornography. Today, the perception itself has pornographic features. It occurs as an immediate contact, even as a copulation of image and eye. The erotic occurs in the blink of an eye” (Han, 2022), that is, it is precisely its opposite, we are in the existential void, in the denial of Being and in it only pornography remains, as a degradation of Being.

Quoting Barthes, Hul-Han clarifies the part of the piece that is: “Absolute subjectivity can only be achieved in a state of silence, the effort to achieve silence (closing the eyes means making the image speak in the silence). Photography touches me when I remove it from its usual blahblablah […] not say anything, close my eyes […]” (Han, 2022) and he is quoting Roland Barthes in his work (photo): The camera lucida (or Lucid, depending on the translation).

Photography is therefore a way of perpetuating silence, the desire of many to take photos as an individual act is to remove it from everyday life and insert something that is eternal, while the public exposure that the digital universe has allowed is to return it to the “ usual blahblabla”, says the author: “The disaster of digital communication arises from the fact that we don’t have time to close our eyes” and maybe he doesn’t know but this is even physical, by not blinking our eyes we should use eye lubricants if We expose it for a lot of time on screens.

“Noise is both acoustic pollution and visual pollution. It pollutes attention” (Han, 2022) and citing Michel Serres says that this instinct is of animal origin, as dogs, tigers and other animals that urinate to demarcate land, pollute with their stench to inhibit other animals from approaching.

Allowing others to approach is not demarcating territory. Jesus’ biblical response to the initial contact of two new disciples is wise (John 1:38): “Jesus asked: “What are you looking for?” They said, “Rabbi (which means: Master), where do you live?” and he replied: “Come and see” and they went and stayed with Him, because he did not demarcate ground and did not close himself.

The logic of silence is contrary to noise, which does not just mean the pollution of an audible sound, but a complete void capable of containing and receiving the Other.

Han, Byung-Chul  (2022) Não-coisas : reviravoltas do mundo da vida , transl. of the Rafael Rodrigues Garcia. Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: ed. Vozes.

 

 

 

The non-thing and the amoral world

11 Jan

For Byung Chul-Han, what is changing is the world of merchandise with the digital, he will analyze the power of the book and the ebook, the latter as a non-thing, the smartphone and other digital objects, but the world of morals as well is changing, he quotes in passing:

“A person uninterested in things, in possessions, does not submit to the “morality of things” based on work and property. She wants to play more than work; experience and enjoy more than possess. In its cultural phase, the economy also shows playful traits. Theatrics and performance are becoming increasingly meaningful. Cultural production, that is, the production of information, increasingly adapts artistic processes. Creativity becomes its motto”, using Vilém Flusser’s reasoning about the moral of the thing.

What Chul-Han calls the cultural phase should be an in-depth analysis of the period of the cultural industry, radio, cinema and television, which was nothing more than a transition from merchandise to the imagination through advertising, where the brand and not the content, so not only are the work and the product alienated, but its very essence is alienated, using a term from the medieval period, as we have already analyzed in a previous post, it loses its quiddity, its identity and singularity, as it was the cultural industry that gave everything the appearance of sameness.

Also in the final section he will analyze things of the heart, and it is good to remember that these also had their singularity in the past, today transformed into an amoral and timeless character, in the wrong sense of the word, what is eternal is essence and singular and then returns to quiddity.

The final section says, things of the heart, recalling the fox’s dialogue with The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “The little prince asks the fox what “apprivoiser” means. To which the fox responds: “It’s something almost forgotten […]. It means becoming familiar, establishing relationships. […] For me, you are just a little boy like a hundred thousand others” and this is the loss of singularity, there it will introduce listening and the relationship with the Furthermore, these relationships cannot be developed without a moral conception.

The exposure of personal relationships, the end of private life through legal and illegal filming, the increasing exposure of even children, is increasing and amoral, there is no room for growth and respect for the morals of each age, not even old age, Rejected as moral and as an age of wisdom, it is increasingly common to expose this “good age” in a pejorative and amoral sense, without limits of respect (Chul-Han calls it symmetry in The Swarm) and a balanced morality.

Everything seen as “freedom”, but which plunges into “upheavals in the world of life”, the author’s subtitle, we are heading towards a civilizational crisis and the return depends not on things, but on a new morality of the state, of human relations and of public life.

Han, Byung-Chul  (2022) Não-coisas : reviravoltas do mundo da vida / Byung-Chul Han ; tradução de Rafael Rodrigues Garcia. Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: ed. Vozes.

 

 

Being, the clearing and non-things

09 Jan

Studying the etymology of Glade, taking it from Heidegger’s philosophy, it comes from the German word Lichtung, where in addition to the meaning of clearing in the forest (he himself lived for a few years in the black forest of Germany), while Licht is the word for light, it will mean hidden things, or entities whose truth must come to light, thus some translators use unveiling.

The light reminds us of what the magi followed, who were followed by a star that they carried until the birth of Jesus, they were probably Persian followers of Zoroaster, a painting from Ravenna (Picture in wall of Ravenna church, 526 DC) that is very old reveals the hats they wore and the pants that were from that region.

The clearing is, in the context of modern philosophy, what is hidden within a whole, where Being must emerge, and this seems more appropriate to modernity, since the fragmentation where only the part emerges, is most often opposed to the whole. to which the entity belongs, thus the question of Being.

The being that discovers itself, Heidegger himself stated: “lets itself be seen in its being and be discovered. The true-being (truth) of the statement must be understood in the sense of being-discoverer” (Heidegger, 1986, 219).

First we see this ontological truth as Being, and no longer as logic, second we see this relationship between knowing the object and the relationship with Being itself, which in modern philosophy could be called subjectivity, but it is not because they are not separate instances, However, separated from their object materiality they can become something beyond what was conceived until recently, the philosopher Byung Chul-Han wrote an essay about non-things, the world of digital objects where the “inflation of things deceives us into believing in opposite”.

The author will refer to the contemporary world as “As information hunters, we become blind to silent, discreet things, even ordinary things, trivialities or conventionalities that lack stimulation, but that we perceive in our daily lives”, and thus we plunge into a darkness of Being as opposed to clearing.

The digital order is making the world unearthly, unsubstantial, says the author in the preface: “Today, the earthly order is being replaced by the digital order. The digital order dethings the world by computerizing it” capturing a category from Vilém Flusser states: “Non-things are currently invading our environment from all sides, and are supplanting things. These non-things are called information”, citing Flusser’s work: Dinge und Undinge – Phenomenological Sketches. Munich, 1993, it is worth remembering that Flusser lived in Brazil from 1940 to 1972.

In this logic, silence, the vita (life) contemplative (another book by the author) escapes, and Being collapses.

Han, Byung-Chul  (2022) Não-coisas : reviravoltas do mundo da vida / Byung-Chul Han ; tradução de Rafael Rodrigues Garcia. – Petrópolis, RJ : Vozes, 202

HEIDEGGER, M. Sein und Zeit. 17 ed. Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1986.

 

Globalism or Universalism, a new period

05 Jan

The current crisis clearly points to a civilizational crisis, Eurocentric and Enlightenment visions already showed their exhaustion in previous periods, by thinkers such as Nietzsche and Shopenhauer who sought elements in Western philosophy, but quantum physics and studies on an era called “anthropocene ” such as the transdisciplinary studies of Anna Tsing, founder of AURA (Arhus University Research on the Anthropocene) and one of the editors of the Feral Atlas (feralatlas.org) published by Stanford University Press.

Thus, the theories of globalism and NWO (New World Order) are nothing more than conspiracy theories, although the political forces at play may also have influences from various political organizations that desire new forms of imperialism and population control.

Simply looking at an increasingly complex universe in which old Copernican and Newtonian paradigms, of great influence on Western thought, die, show a much more complex reality, such as string theory pointed out by Michio Kaku as one of the few alternatives to explain the universe as we now see it through megatelescopes.

Even Einstein’s idea of ​​understanding the mind of God is very far from what a theory of Everything and the Whole really means, where it is almost impossible not to think of a Being with an unimaginable intelligence who created everything, a simple energy or chance is simplistic Too many and even theoretical physicists such as Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Michio Kaku have admitted this hypothesis.

However, it is difficult to imagine a mega-intelligent consciousness in the face of such primary reasoning that involves the majority of Christian thinkers, figures such as Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scottus and Boethius, these last two are considered saints by Catholics, seem to be overshadowed by a fundamentalist primarism that ignores the complex universe we live in and which still reveals itself to be incomprehensible within human limits.

For serious religious people, it would be enough to examine the visit of the wise (see youtube) men (people from other beliefs and cultures) who came to worship the newborn in Bethlehem to become aware that God is universal and is not limited to human dictates and customs, but there is a lot of false prophecy.

The limit of a true Christianity should be as Augustine of Hippo said: “the limit of Love is to love without limits”, this should be essential to a true God of Love.

The 3 Wise kings – Documentary Discovery Civilization l Dublado l – YouTube

 

 

From information to narration

02 Jan

The title is purposefully the opposite of the first chapter of Byung Chul Han’s book on the crisis of narration, although he quotes Walter Benjamin who cites the experience of narration in a period before the internet, but the Korean-German philosopher does not clearly see this previous crisis the internet, and thus he himself falls into what he condemns, the absence of analysis in time.

If it is true that the Internet and its tool for making information available to laypeople, which is the Web (born in the 90s, more than 20 years after the internet) not only created a profusion of means of disseminating information and its narratives, but also created the possibility of its profusion in audio and video, which gives rise to a new possibility of recorded narration for podcasts and videos.

Of course, this does not mean that that primitive narrative prior to writing and the press, typical of primary orality, has returned, it exists in original cultures and also in some Western cultures and beliefs, for example, among the Kurds there are the “çîrokbê” who, if it were Literally translated, it would be what we understand in Western culture as “history”.

Byung Chul Han’s sentence about the digital universe is clear: “Digitalization deobjectifies and disembodies the world. It also eliminates memories” (Han, 2022) this is partly true, but digital media itself, once recorded, becomes a thing, and once a narration is made, just for example, by Kurdish narrators, the information (in the sense of Chul Han) returns to narration, that is, the reverse process is possible.

Its error, from a philosophical point of view, is an old question about what things are (or what they are), the relationship between subject and object is the result of Western dualism since Parmenides, and only a non-dual vision can understand that the A thing is also not a thing in itself, once narrated.

Thus, information will always be paradoxical, it is narrated when it is and not narrated after it has become narrated-information and is subject to historical distance, but if seen from the point of view of quantum physics it is even more complex, because there are both things, from which the question arises from some physicists that time does not exist, difficult for today’s culture.

This question of time arose in 2012 in a TedTalk by the Italian Carlo Roveli: “Time Doesn’t Exist and I’ll Tell You That in 15 Minutes”, but has gained popularity now because the James Webb mega-telescope proposes several new paradigms when looking deeper into the universe, We are at the end of the Copernican era, the center of our galaxy is a black hole and they have already started to say what they are, dark matter and dark energy are also beginning to be revealed.

The theoretical physicist Michio Kaku gives the history of this idea, “In The God Equation” (ed. Record, 224 pp, trans.: Alexandre Cherman), and there he gives a written account of today’s physics.

Han, Byung-Chul (2022). Não-coisas : reviravoltas do mundo da vida / Byung-Chul Han ; tradução de Rafael Rodrigues Garcia. – Petrópolis, RJ : Vozes, Brazil.

 

Inform, symbol and connect

15 Nov

What was missing in the text of Crisis of Narration, there is also something wrong in “Infocracy: digitalization and the crisis of democracy in philosophy” (2022) of Byung-Chul, the idea that information is in itself incomplete, is present in another book entitled Vita Contemplativa (ed. Vozes, 2023) because there, returning to being, one can find how form becomes narration within being, and becomes in-form.

An excerpt from this book says: “The loss of shared feeling accentuates the lack of being. The community is a symbolically mediated totality. The symbolic narrative void leads to the fragmentation and erosion of society.” (HAN, 2023, p. 91-92). (emphasis added)

Thus recognizing this aspect of the need for being as a symbolic void, which the contemporary narrative in general does not contemplate due to its informational vices, at the same time the author states: “The human being, as a symbolon, longs for a sacred and restorative totality” (page 92).

The term symbolon appears prominently because the author uses it based on a reading of Plato’s Banquet, where Aristophanes remembers that this broken piece of being, which for him was initially spherical and was broken, has this broken piece with a “symbol”.

Now if symbol is a part, united to another part we form a totality, not just in a community, but in every “sacred and restorative totality”, where there are men united for a good and just cause.

Narrative and information in this context, where the part is united, as an important principle defended by Edgar Morin said: “It is necessary to replace a thought that isolates and separates with a thought that unites and distinguishes”, thus the union of distinct “symbols” and that are part of contemporary cultures and peoples.

Thus, the ontological information (proper to being) linked to the context of the narration in its time and the object of thoughts within a diversity, are not a reason for fragmentation but rather for a universe that unites us and makes us more “whole” within our lives. communities.

Contemporary hyperactivity, which not only but also the digital world can lead us to, is itself a world that rejects internalization, meditation and thus, narration itself.

The author writes about this interiority: “Active life, with its pathos of action, blocks access to religion” (page 154), action is part of religious life as much as lay life, what differentiates is that in addition to prudence, our reflections from last week, can lead to a different, fair action that leads to happiness and fulfillment different from pure “action”.

Pathos, to clarify, is part of the Greek triad “ethos, pathos and logos”, while ethos persuades us through character, or by whoever narrates, if this is worthy of faith, logos persuades us through logical (broad) reason and pathos by feelings caused by sadness or joy, love or hate, and so often without going through reason and ethics.

HAN, Byung-Chul. (2023) Vita Contemplativa or about inactivity. Trans. Lucas Machado. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes.

 

 

The return of evil

19 Sep

Even if due to naivety or social context, from time to time demons, existing or not, come back to haunt us, there is a truth between reality and fiction: it exists, if not in the imaginary (as some think) also as a real entity.

Horror films, almost all mere fiction, exist, and their audience is not small, as in the case of “The Exorcist” (1973) and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (1980), two classics of the genre, but there are films that can stand out as works of art: “Nosferatu” (1922 and remake 2018) and “Get Out!” by director and screenwriter Jordan Peele, who competed for the Oscar for best film in 2018.

In the work directed by F. W. Murnau (1922) there is something of German expressionism, with techniques of using shadows, treated more as a madness around the unknown, also remember that we are in between the wars when Germany and Russia sign the Treaty of Ropallo, trying to form a counterweight in the global geopolitics of the time, an agreement that would last until Hitler.

There are certainly other films, however, they are now reappearing with a more strongly religious tone and color: “The Pope’s Exorcist” (Julius Avery, released this year) which talks about events that happened to Father Gabriele Amorth, who was officially an exorcist from Rome recognized by the Church Catholic, in the film directed by Russell Crowe (Guys – Nice Guys, War Promises – The Water Diviner), the other demon film is Nefarious (Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon, based on the 2016 novel by Steve Deace: A Nefarious plot) .

While Nefarious is another fiction about the existence and tricks of the Devil, with some Christian contours, The Pope’s Exorcist is based on real events narrated by Father Gabriele himself, who performed more than 60 thousand exorcisms and certainly some notable ones were selected, among From the conversations that are narrated there, I quote the most important one, in which during a possession he says that the devil can only do what God has allowed, his power is limited.

I don’t like the genre, but I had more patience with “The Pope’s Exorcist” out of curiosity and an attempt to understand the problem, but situated in a context of confusing social issues and the danger of an even bloodier war than those currently underway, but Without Manichaeism, the power of evil is not greater than that of good, and its effects are not comparable.

Evil has a real existence due to the absence of good, so thought Augustine of Hippo, who was a Manichaean in his youth.

 

 

Exemption from violence and anger

12 Sep

It was not the Abrahamic religions (Islam, Judaism and Christianity) that exempted violence, as Peter Sloterdijk thought in Wrath and Time (Sloterdijk, 2010), in fact it was the idea of ​​the Enlightenment that made violence and domination, from the beginning of expansion of mercantilism and which later became colonial-imperialism, which was anti-clerical and little religious, and was later sacralized in Hegel’s “absolute”, whose image of power and the State is juxtaposed with power and domination and has nothing linked to God.

Thus this power is the relief from violence and its capture and guardianship by the state, this way the colonial and imperialist plan can be developed, the basis of today’s civilizational crisis, it is a military and autocratic arrogant state, liberal only in name, it cannot result in something else: anger.

Sloterdijk’s observation about lightness and relief is particularly clear. Supposing that progress would go on a progressive journey, we would think of a more trivial answer that he would be leading people in better conditions than before, and this is not true.

The author also talks about pain, he remembers that until 1940 the idea of ​​pain was normal in surgical center treatments, he doesn’t mention it but I remember that scars on men’s faces indicated virility and some were done on purpose, predecessors of current tattoos, the author remembers that painkillers appeared in the 40s and then little by little antidepressants and stimulants and finally plastic surgeries that corrected what needs to be corrected in us.

The author says that thinking on the right is discipline and on the left is the salvation of the poor, discipline falls into dreams and leads to the world of the moon, while poverty in its fallen condition, persecuted by an unjust system is always seen victimized, which is not always real, so both narratives escape a concept of justice, peace and balance and we find ourselves in narratives that justify anger and contempt for the Other, moving towards anger.

If the being must be light it is to be someone who is not serious, so the lightness of the being is unsustainable, it must be in both narratives “heavy”, transforming into gas balloons that are flying aimlessly, the flight itself is not is reasonable, although the ultimate desire is everything can, but nothing is.

If the being must be light it is to be someone who is not serious, so the lightness of the being is unsustainable, it must be in both narratives “heavy”, transforming into gas balloons that are flying aimlessly, the flight itself is not is reasonable, although the ultimate desire is everything can, but nothing is.

The popular Brazilian songbook says: “there is no sin on the side below the equator”, but that was already the case in post-Renaissance Europe, in Dante’s “divine comedy” which became Balzac’s human comedy, it was there that did the circumnavigation (in picture the Art for Jacob Hashimoro), yes the earth is round, so the people should be dominated and colonized, again Slotertijk’s spherology makes sense.

The fundamental event of our time is to get out of this heavy burden of dogmatism, from the perfectionist stress of the tired society, to get out of the physical, discursive, political, design and spatial battles, technology for man and not for man, robots are machines.

It’s the agony of what was heavy and no longer has a coherent narrative. spherology is based on the principle that a kind of “hermeneutics of existence” must form art of figures, meanings and vocabularies of a light existence, let’s say, discharged from hatred for the Other who is not our mirror, of course the reverse path is there, he leads to anger and violence.

Sloterdijk, P. (2010) Rage and Time, translation by Mario Wenning, New York, Columbia University Press.

 

New holodomor and the war

07 Aug

While there are expectations of new meetings for peace with Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, the perspectives of a greater involvement of other countries in the war grow with the danger of a war on a global scale.

In the harsh period of the former Soviet Union, there had already been a conflict between the Russian Soviet Republic and the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, the holodomor in 1931-32, in which the dictator Joseph Stalin confiscated Ukrainian production, killing a large number of Ukrainians from starvation, there is a book on the subject (pdf), the ukrainians managed many years after declaring this episode of their national life as a genocide.

Russia had already undermined Ukraine’s supply sources, now it systematically bombs ports and grain storage sites and spreads mines across the borders of the conquered territory, the Ukrainian economy already in ruins, now suffers a hard blow and with that there are a threat to world grain supplies.

The internal battlefront remains tough, with small advances in the counteroffensive, but the pole is now moving towards the Black Sea, where grain export ships can be hit and already a provocation with Poland, by the Wagner group that is in Belarus .

Some discourses and narratives hide the horrors of war, death of civilians, distribution and disasters in rivers and energy sources, and violation of war treaties, with mutilation and torture of prisoners, and use of weapons of war prohibited by international agreements such as, land mines, white phosphorus bombs and cluster bombs.

An involvement of Poland and Belarus, would be the first scale of a world war, reminiscent of the invasion of Germany in 1st. of September 1939, which was the trigger for the involvement of several countries, the first to declare war were England and France.

The political and financial involvement of other countries is already practically declared, with forces alongside Ukraine and Russia, but common sense still makes some countries and more cautious diplomats think about the disaster for the economy in addition to the serious danger of using nuclear force.

The forces for peace have started a conference of senior officials from around 40 countries, including the US, China, South Africa and India and are taking part in the discussions in the coastal city of Jeddah, on the Red Sea, being European newscasters, including the German DW (Deutsch Welle), without the participation of Russia.

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Dialogue and diversity

09 Jun

The clash between two Hegelian conceptions of the state and the absence of dialogue and new horizons are among the causes of the civilizational crisis.

Both the modernist old Hegelians and the new revolutionaries point to a vision of the state with a single discourse, absence of dialogue and tolerance, this is the root of the crisis.

What we notice is the superficiality of this fundamental problem, each one creating truths that they think are universal and sometimes are even bizarre, as they are only at the level of ideas and do not correspond to reality, they do not contribute to a real way out of the crisis of civilization.

Every day, “wise men” of some kind emerge who already have the solution to major problems involving leaders, nations and cultures that have developed, in general taken root and have great difficulty in dialoguing with other worldviews.

Coexistence in diversity is fundamental for a democratic society, when only a vision of the world and a way of administering the state is imposed a part of the population is outside this dialogue and will not see any way out other than rebellion, at the level of the state it means war.

We have lived through two world wars, the result of a colonialist conception of the state, however the current one is more serious because it is a vision of imperialist hegemony of opposing forces.

It is true that there are social forces striving to open a path of dialogue, but in the diplomatic field it has failed, not for lack of proposals, but for discreetly aligning themselves with one of the conflicting sides.

In the religious field this also occurs, the Pharisaic view that it is not possible to dialogue and see how important it is to live with “sinners” and “tax collectors” (those who mismanage the state or are corrupt today) is described in Matthew 9,11 -13:

“Some Pharisees saw this and asked the disciples: “Why does your master eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus heard the question and replied: “Those who are healthy do not need a doctor, but the sick do. So learn what it means: ‘I want mercy and not sacrifice.’ Indeed, I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners “.

The sacrifice of millions of innocents takes place in a war because there is no force that dialogues with the sin of conflict, hatred and war without human and moral limits (in photo, the explosion of the dam in Nova Kakhovka, Kherson region).

Without tolerance and dialogue, no peace is possible, and civilization is currently experiencing a crisis.