Arquivo para a ‘Information Science’ Categoria
Mystery is not ignorance
25
Aug
Stories of cultures, of cultural traditions that involve the imaginary
, and the imaginary itself are shrouded in mysteries, but they should not be confused with ignorance or superstitions, this is what can be read in the book of the almost centenary Edgar Morin “Knowledge, Ignorance and Mystery ”. there is a lot about knowledge, something about ignorance and the essentials about mystery, Morin’s dosage is perfect and a good remedy for the pandemic.
He is preparing a book for the pandemic, but as he always anticipates the story I hope to read and I believe he is one of the few who can talk about the new name or the post-pandemic precisely because he emphasized in one of his conferences that the health crisis caught us by surprise and put us on our knees.
In addition to planetary books like “Terra Pátria”, about epistemology “The Method” in six volumes, it is one of the rare ones that ventured to tread new paths in our global dilemmas through “To Exit the 20th century” and “Before the Abyss” However, in this 2018 book, your leap is over the mystery without slipping through the easy paths of belief and ignorance, questions both the fetish of reason and materialistic determinism, among its various works are the Transdisciplinary Studies done in a Center of these studies in Paris with the philosopher, important for the digital world Michel Serres, recently deceased, and proclaims that with discipline and excessive specialization we can move towards a new “obscurantism”.
He clearly separates ignorance from mystery, for him “ We can only apprehend the real through representations and interpretations. The reality of the outside world is a humanized reality: we do not know it directly, but through our human spirit, translated / reconstructed not only by our perceptions, but also by our language, our theories or philosophies, our cultures and societies ”, and for him, the mystery is equated by transdisciplinarity as “the contradiction to which all in-depth knowledge arrives is not an error, but the last conceivable truth”.
He values mystery as a path of discovery and knowledge: “Complex knowledge is the necessary path to reach the unknowable. Otherwise, we remain ignorant of our ignorance. The mystery in no way detracts from the knowledge that leads to it. ”
He calls our current environment as having a “culture of cancellation”, a more resentful half-sole in the old ideological patrols, and they now seem to intensify with the return of ideological polarization, which in the post-war created a constant tension in all of humanity. Which reminds you when children cover their ears and emit mimetic chants (he calls gutturals) so as not to hear interlocutors who contradict them (if you never know that you may be wrong, you will be right forever), so the polarization and radicalization seems to come from nursery education. It is not only the natural environment that needs biodiversity, the cultural environment and democracy also needs it, as Morin says, in fact “they depend on biodiversity”, we are willing to live with what is different or we want to eliminate it, the answer given in global scale is frightening, it is no mystery to ignorance and contempt for the Other.
Morin, Edgar (2020). Conhecimento, Ignorância, Mistério (Knowledge, Ignorance, Mystery). 1st. edition. BR: Bertrand do Brasil.
Who is The truth for you?
21
Aug
What is certain is that the truth is who and not what because what
will only be an object and this truth could only be established by a dual relationship: from the subject to the object which he interprets, that is why we fall into relativism or into pure doxa, opinion, truth can only be established in the relationship with the Other, in Socratic philosophy, the truth is not with men, but is among them, in their relationality.
However, the establishment of this truth requires ontological unveiling, it is not simple because although it is intrinsic to being, what occurs from idealism is a great veiling of being, only from Heidegger will this unveiling be thought of, but we still remain at night of thought and culture.
Being in relation to objects, which is also intrinsic to being, it is a material substance, the Greek hylé, from which hilemorfismo (theory that adds hylé and morphé) arose according to which all corporeal beings are composed of matter and form , which from scholasticism is thought of as a substance.
The consequences of this ontological truth have an impact on philosophical anthropology, which studies how man can understand himself, so a metaphysical sense is recovered and man can also be discussed in an eschatological sense, from where he comes and where he will go, or teleological as conventional literature prefers.
Philosophers like Bernar Groethuysen affirmed that “the reflection on ourselves, always renewed reflection that the man does to come to understand himself”, already Landsberg will say otherwise: “conceptual explanation of the idea of the man from the conception that he has of yourself at a certain stage in your existence ”, but the question is up to you and everyone who or what (for the question not being directional) is the truth?
If the question is hilemorphic, man came from the dust and the dust will return, but there is an aortic response, especially for our day, its shape or structure may change and so there will be a change, what Fritjof Capra called the reinvention of man, and that I think as a Christian, a change in his soul.
After a long life with the disciples is the question that Jesus is also going to ask his disciples (Mt, 16: 13-14): “Who say that men are the Son of Man?” They answered: “some say that it is John the Baptist; others that is Elijah, still others that is Jeremiah or one of the prophets ”, but who today is for us, not for non-believers, even for Christians, he still seems to be an enigmatic, miraculous, historical, political character or was it even God.
The truth may seem too simple, not have a deep intricate logic, not be linked to any form of power or temporal politics, but what if He is the truth? how much would change in the life of the planet, how would our view of the pandemic, the distribution of goods and solidarity change?
To those who do not believe and if it is really true, it could be a great answer in times of pandemic and social difficulties, but his question is there.
Truth is ontological, is it logical or is it power
20
Aug
The sophists said that man is the measure of things (Protagoras),
not to affirm any ontological principle, only to reaffirm the current status quo that ultimately is power, they used the art of persuasion (Gorgias) for this and lastly they affirmed the convenience of the strongest (Trasímaco), almost all appear in the dialogues of Plato, through the dialogues of Socrates) and whose concern was to contest them to affirm the democracy of the polis.
Then we lived for several centuries organizing the laws until the transition from the Greek city-state to the post-middle age towns, where liberalism will grow until it becomes the modern state, creating the concept of nation and the social contract that governs a specific people .
For the modern epistemological view, truth is linked to the object (the thing itself) and this makes it relative, since it is subject to space, time and categories, this concept comes from Aristotle, but it was on him that the thought of middle ages were divided between nominalists and realists, but for both and also for Descartes who will establish the res-extensive (matter), the res-cogitans (thinking thing) and the divine res (perfect, infinite thinking thing).
It is Kant who makes the connection of the thinking thing about the object becoming relative, since such truth is to the knowing subject having then a subjective face, proper to the subject, for him the “thing in itself” (the object) becomes “The thing in me” (subject to subjectivity).
This means that before the object, the conscience develops the work in the production of the truth according to the space in which that object is occupying, the time that it is situated and in which category it fits, then it is a matter of categorizing and organizing the objects around concepts.
It is not difficult to understand that this creates a logical structure that will initially create a positivist logic and later a logical empiricism, or a neologicism, in both currents any metaphysical aspect is denied, so logic is no longer a function of an argumentative construction , but from a calculation of propositions that follows a logical structure, ultimately it is also what justifies power and its machinations.
We return to the sophist narratives, the idea that it is the power that says what is true, so it is a matter of conquering it many times in a logic in which the ends justify the means, thus corruption is justified, the absence of virtues morals and even death.
The ontological truth seemed to have succumbed, but it was hermeneutics and phenomenology that brought modern ontology back to its roots, Franz Brentano will use a subcategory of the ontological concept of consciousness, by elevating intentionality to a higher category and making it a “mental phenomenon” .
Husserl, a student of Brentano, will recreate the intentionality and remove it from the psychological aspect still with an empiric remnant, and will say that it only makes sense to call consciousness, the “awareness of something”, this means that there is no awareness of the thing-in- itself, but the intentionality in the awareness of something.
Intentionality distinguishes property from mental phenomenon: being necessarily directed towards an object, whether real or imaginary. It is in this sense, and in Husserl’s phenomenology, that this term is used in contemporary philosophy, also by Heidegger, but which will recover and transform the idea of Being.
However, it is necessary to remember that Heidegger in My Way in Phenomenology, was due to the reading in 1907 of Brentano’s dissertation written in 1862: “The multiple meaning of being in Aristotle” (Brentano, 1862) and this meant a resumption of the path of his master Edmund Husserl.
Heidegger, unlike Brentano, denies the fundamental characterization of being as a substance, since, Brentano was still linked to the medieval interpretive tradition, disregarding the dimension of the role in language, for this reason he will properly say that his Dasein is a “new question” .
The true-being (the ontological truth) as being-discoverer [Wahrsein (Wahrheit) besagt entdeckend-sein] is the way in which aletheia appears, it is what Heidegger calls unveiling, taking it literally (but translated that is already an interpretation):
“The statement is true means: it discovers the being in itself. He enunciates, indicates, “lets see” (apophansis) the being in his being and being discovered. The true-being (truth) of the statement must be understood in the sense of being-discoverer. ” (HEIDEGGER, 2009, p. 289)
HEIDEGGER, M. (2009) Ser e Tempo (Being and Time). 4ª ed. Trad. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback. (Brazilian edition) Petrópolis: São Paulo.
Ame Agaru and pandemic
19
Aug
The film by an assistant to Akira Kurosawa, Tadashi Koizumi, has this
name “After the rain” (Ame Agaru, 1999) was a script by Kurosawa that Tadashi inherited, the first point that can be highlighted in this film is the relationship between man / nature that limits human action and they are stuck in the middle of a path waiting for the rain to pass, like many others also have a samurai.
But he will have to perform a task that is not very worthy of a samurai, to get money for people who stay there can eat, this is my analogy with the pandemic, from the time when everyone is trapped in the house, an analogy I make with social isolation.
The protagonist of the film is a character of the type “jidai-geki” (the films that are inspired by the history of Japan), it could also be a film about the “autumn of a samurai”, there is another script film made by Kurosawa’s heirs called “Rhapsody in August” (1991), in this the director was Kiyoko Mura.
This worldview of not conceiving man apart from nature, in times when ecology was still a marginal topic, now with the rediscovery of nature we have an interesting analogy to be made, nature limited us behind a virus, and yesterday we saw temperature spikes low in the south of the American continent, temperatures have been 20ºC below zero in Rio Grande (Tierra del Fuego), according to data from the National Meteorological Service (SMN) of Argentina.
In the USA where it is summer, the high temperature record was in the “death valley”, 54.4ºC a record very close to the highest temperature ever recorded in the region, which was 56.9ºC in 1913, according to the National Meteorological Service ( American NWS), nature shows its signs of reaction to the pandemic ecological action of centuries.
Returning the rain in the middle of a forest where poor people pass, at a certain moment the samurai finds himself in the condition of helping those people due to the long period they are isolated, and when he leaves he is faced with a murderer that the samurai will prevent a a duel that could end in death, and for this reason the feudal lord who owns those lands decides to employ him as a swordsman, there remains a qualm that is to accept money, which is dishonorable for the samurai.
The Samurai decides to do it for a noble purpose, which is to have food for those people who are retired there, almost all of them poor because they were making that way through the forest, when they were prevented from proceeding by the rain.
If the message at that time was little appreciated, today with the economic situation that we will have after the pandemic, the message is noble and social.
Below a link to see the film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=1mR0KV-c9EY
The pandemic and the doxa
18
Aug
Mere opinion on topics as complex as the treatment of the pandemic 
exposed the world to mere opinion or “doxa” as the Greeks called what was opposed to episteme or organized and systematized knowledge.
The number of curious solutions in the fight against the virus is enormous: using lemon to ozone, the remedies that are effective for other diseases such as the use of chloroquine for malaria, uses of teas and hot water, certain fruits and vegetables, FioCruz that accompanies the Oxford vaccine development carried out a survey, which gives 73% of the news about coronavirus cures as false, mostly home recipes with no effect on the disease.
All life in Plato’s time (428/427 BC – 348/347 BC) happened around the polis, where there was already the citizen of the polis, the politician, but still dominated the sophists, who sought only arguments to favor power , without worrying about justice and truth.
In the book Plato’s Republic the term episteme, which previously supported the possibility of being a skill for something, now acquires the content of knowledge full of certainty, an evident knowledge that is linked to the reality of Eidos (the Idea for the ancients), with this episteme is true knowledge and totally opposed to doxa, reduced to simple opinion.
It is in the relationship between epistemology and ethics, that it is possible to consider the action from a doxa point of view, although it does not mean a basis for this type of ethical knowledge in Plato, as he will appear with Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC), in particular in his book “Ética a Nicômaco”.
The problem of determining these concepts by linking them to ethical issues appears in the first dialogues until the Republic, which remains afterwards in the dialogues about the Laws, making it possible to address this issue in later dialogues.
Plato uses the concepts of nous (Republic VI 511d4) and noesis (Republic VI 511e1), the doxa is in the world of sensitive reality, while the episteme is in dianoetic knowledge (dianoia, it is the way of thinking lower than noesis) that its object is the noeta, but they are inferior to the dialectic (República VII 533d).
Aristotle will deny the existence of eide (pure thought) in Platonic terms, so his episteme will designate for him the knowledge of the necessary causes (it is developed in the first analytics) and consists of demonstration (apodeixis) and sensation (aisthesis) becomes if necessary for the episteme.
In order not to complicate too much, the Greeks are, it is in Metaphysics (E 1, 1025b-1026a.) That the term episteme will designate a systematic organization of rational knowledge, thus coming to point to theoretical knowledge, in opposition to practical knowledge and poietic (Nicomachean Ethics VI 3, 1139b14-36).
Whatever the form of systematic knowledge, science has its ways and to deny them is to put all of humanity to the test, neither home recipes nor vaccines without the conditions for testing are acceptable, caution is necessary, we have already paid a price too much for deaths in the pandemic, the cure is to eliminate the possibilities of reinfection and side effects, it is the dose of the poison that makes the medicine, but the reverse is also true.
The Lady of God and Greek tragedy
14
Aug
The Greek tragedy Oedipus Rei was analyzed by the poet Hölderlin,
where he uses the term aorgic for the search that Oedipus does to know that it is, since it was donated to a pastor by father Laius to raise him, to avoid the tragedy predicted by the oracle Delphi, and to complete the tragedy Oedipus ends up marrying his own mother.
The term aorgic here is used to understand the corruption of human nature, and it can have a new meaning with each new human tragedy, it is Hölderlin’s sense when saying that “where there is fear there is salvation”, we must fear not only the pandemic that has already it is a disaster, but what can come from inhuman and agonizing after this tragedy.
There is no lack of apocalyptics, however the interesting thing would be to think beyond the tragedy and invert the role of Jocasta for a mother who defends and wants her children safe and sound, and so in a human reinvention we would look not at Eve of human creation, but at Mary who gave birth to the divine son.
It is not only religious prejudice that deviates from this deep sense of human fertility and motherhood, it is the relevance of the role of women in the background, Hölderlin’s analysis involves the paradoxes that commonly constitute the tragic, such as the human and the divine, and the poetic task of modernity as a possible task for any and all poetry, so its cultural plan cannot eliminate the tragic, but must also include the divine.
It is this misogyny of the human to the divine that denies any and all roles of women, Mary should be only a religious theme, but also the divine linked to the tragic, Pietá although remembered and revisited by so many authors, hides the role of the desolate mother before the a faint son, also Salvador Dali in his painting Christus Hypercubus places a female figure at the foot of the four-dimensional Christus, inspired by his wife.
Christians are ignored by the biblical passage of the evangelist Luke (Lk 1,43): “How can I deserve that the mother of my Lord comes to visit me”, and the Lord in this case is not only the divine-human son who will be born of Mary , but also the Lord God of Mary and Isabella, who says this “full of the Holy Spirit” (Lk 1,41), so the relationship is Trinitarian and aorgic, after all the Christmas event is wrapped up in the mystery of the laws of the universe that over it acted.
In the midst of the pandemic it would be extraordinary if the same mother of Pietá was with humanity in her lap (Matris in gremio) and could, in a tragic and divine inspiration, help the humanity that faints and sees an increasingly darker future ahead, the mysteries of Medjugorje and Garabandal (mysterious appearances) may not only be children’s fantasies (today all adults), but the divine revelation about the human tragic, if only it is true, where there is fear, there is salvation.
Post-God or human reinvention
13
Aug
A few days ago I read in Folha de São Paulo (in an online note) that
the famous mystical physicist Fritjof Capra (Tao of Physics) said that the pandemic is a “Pandemic is the biological response of the planet”, and also in his conference in the Frontieras debate of Thought about the “Reinvention of the human”, in which also spoke the economist Paul Collier and french writter Alain Babanckou.
In his lecture, he supposes an awakening in 2050 and visualizing the world and its post-pandemic transformations, already well defined, what he and the futurist Hazel Henderson propose are imaginable perspectives, as which relatives for the past verified as flaws and human conditions which changes they happen to be perceived, I think so, thinking about a distant scenario, I thought a much more valid reflection than thinking about next year.
In the thinking of the Austrian physical-mystic he considers that an expanded consciousness would help to overcome the cognitive limitations (and cultural addition), the mistaken assumptions and ideologies that are called back in the prices of the 20th century, and development and productivist metrics, such as the GDP, ended up allowing huge social and environmental losses and the destruction of the functions of planetary exosystems.
Little is said about the persistence of Religions and the answers they too can give and the role they will play in a post-pandemic stage, although nicht made explicit by the physicist and not even by economists who also come from the inorganic in the thematic conversation of the Swans, of the earth whether by chemical processes, by hands or by divine breath, the truth is that we were created, so a complete nicht eschatology will speak only of the post-human, but of the pre-human.
Where do we come from, from the dust of the planets, now that we can look at thousands across the cosmos like telescopes that are like the reinvention of Galileo’s spyglass that shook the 17th century, we are now looking at an infinitely more enigmatic, like particles of God and as a collapse of matter in black holes, what awaits us is not just a post-God, but the reinvention of a cosmology capable of also giving man his crisis, whose pandemic is just a symptom.
Peter Sloterdij wrote in his “Post-God”, that Greek mythology: “had predicted the revenge of time against eternity from afar, when the allusion that even the immortal gods would have to learn to live with a destiny of higher order ”(Sloterijk, 2019, p. 12) and the Greeks called this Moira, but this destiny also foresees the eschatological Matris in Gremio, described by Sloterdijk himself in“ Spheres I: bubbles ”(see our post).
Taking advantage of the allusion to the rebellious nature of Fritjof Capra, and if it has not yet taken place completely, the post-pandemic can predict an aortic rebellion from outside the planet, and if Moira still wants to have one last word, which was three and not just a Cloto, Láquesis and the Atropos, that wove the threads of the destiny (figure).
While Cloto means to spin, Láquesis means to draw, remember the meaning of Fortuna for the Greeks, and, Atropos, means to move away, in an eschatological sense, that is to say an end, but not an end, it may be that after everything ultimate end and then there is a new hope, perhaps a new “enlightenment”.
Whatever these departures from reality are, they all become important in a tragic moment, after all tragedy is not what it seems, and the romanticism and illusion of modernity is what showed its true face of horror, wrapped in beautiful words, promises of happiness and “well-being”.
Christians, in which I include myself, aware of this “night of God”, have hope for a new aortic manifestation, after all it is at the beginning of human life and should also be in this reinvention of the human for a planet that is home to everyone and not just a few.
Sloterdijk, Peter. (2019) Pós-Deus (Post-God). Trad. Markus A. Hediger. RJ: Vozes.
The tragedy of modern culture
12
Aug
Theodore Dalrymple, pseudonym of the English physician and 
psychiatrist Anthony Daniels, who proposed a reflection on the moral decay of modern culture, the effect of the politically correct dangerous on society (as if it were a single political position) and the consequences for the true culture of peoples, your book Anything goes (2016) is a profound “clinical” analysis of what kind of cultural crisis we are experiencing.
The author collaborates with several periodicals The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Observer and The Spectator, it is a conservative point of view that looks at history without a doubt, but it is nevertheless important to make some observations about contemporary life and see how many others wear out the current culture.
She won her first Freedom in Flanders in 2011, a region that speaks Flemish two thirds of Belgium, after praising her as an educated woman, she will criticize her nationalism: “I requested a room… the receptionist answered me in English, but not because of my accent with my wife, who is Parisian, she did the same.
We were thus introduced to Flemish nationalism, which demonstrates that no country is too small for national separatism” (page 30), the other region is French-speaking Wallonia, but only Flemish in Flanders, even if they know French .
He reveals his true identity in the book by saying “as a doctor and psychiatrist, I spent a terrible period of my career trying to take people on a path that seemed appropriate and beneficial to them” (p. 81) and then confesses his failure, he says that their patients were “self-destructive, which, if looked at impartially and with a minimum of common sense, could not lead to anything other than anguish” (idem), but it is not their high point.
In another line, but also in defense of the culture that has arisen among the peoples of the planet, with clear and unmistakable roots, Byung-Chul Han, a Korean philosopher migrated to Germany, also criticizes the culture of the smooth, the absence of imperfections and grooves that are confused in art with the politically correct.
Wrote Byung-Chul wrote that beauty today is smooth, does not show resistance, does not break and requires likes, distance invites only touch, there is no negativity that is opposite, without it, surprise and wonder disappear: “without distance no it is possible to have mystique, demystification makes everything fruiting and consumable. ”, there is no otherness of the Other, there is only room for an aestheticized and homogenized diversity, and thus consumable and explored.
It is not about defending tradition, good critics and good reformers always engage in dialogue with the opposite side, but what is involved is forgetfulness and even contempt for the roots of each culture and a massification that wants to make everything uniform and misshapen .
It is only one side of the culture that reaches the thought that has become vulgar and sophist, of the religion that has become ideological or fundamentalist, and of the culture that we all descend from that is ignored, the social and moral consequences are only the visible part of that occurs in the foundations of modern society.
DALRYMPLE, Thedore. (2016) Qualquer coisa serve. (Our culture: what´s left of it). trad. Hugo Langone. São Paulo: É Realizações.
Between tragedy and idealism
11
Aug
The big theme during the pandemic, which attracts crowds
is happiness, not by chance, since happiness was in everything that is now closed: the mall, the cinema, the houses of orgies and drinking, the simple ecstasy of being in a frenzied crowd for some frivolous reason, after all it is the frivolity that everyone wants to come back, there will be nothing great to penetrate the tragedy of a pandemic, it is necessary to find the culprits and punish them for banishing frivolous life and putting us all in constant tension, in fear and far from simple enjoyment.
Nietzsche wrote about The Birth of Tragedy, and blamed Empedocles for his death, but it was Hölderling who will write about Empedocles’ Death, it was he before Nietzsche who rediscussed the tragedy, and the tragic of the tragedy, in a dialogue with German idealism and that’s when he coined his most famous phrase: “where there is fear there is salvation”, almost in the same vein as Cassius Clay who became Mohammed Ali: “it is the lack of faith that makes people fear challenges”.
The pandemic is none other than the fact of understanding the limits of the human, the persistence of tragedy in our lives and destinies, and the fatality of death, those who never thought of it are those who fear it most now, it is never so close of all, but tragedy is evil, or the false sale of easy happiness, it is in it that the charlatans of philosophy, faith and even science without “label” rely.
The Death of Empedocles, an unfinished play, where Hölderlin worked from 1797 to 1799, in his poetic texts from this period, where he thought about the essence of the tragic is marked by a great antagonism, but above all the unification of antagonism with contradiction, where he makes it clear that the theme should be “the true modern tragedy”, perhaps not during the two tragic wars we face, but now in an endless pandemic.
In his analysis, Empedocles hates civilization, is a mortal enemy of limited human existence, cannot bear to live under time, suffers for not being a god, for not being in close union with the whole, and for a need that stems from his being deeper, I decide to die by throwing myself into the volcano.
He is less of a liar than the real ones of simple formulas for happiness, but tragic that he wants to be a god himself and that he would be more “noble” than to admit a God, killed not by tragedy, but by German idealism, after all from Fichte to Schelling, the great expression that transgresses the limit imposed by Kant on human knowledge, when considering all intuition, that which is sensitive to objects, becomes intellectual intuition and artistic intuition, being able to give an immediate knowledge to the absolute, of possibility revelations that are directed to the whole.
So in the essay “Foundation for Empedocles” says that tragedy is the expression of the “deepest intimate unity” that is exposed by real oppositions, the idea owes not only much to Schelling’s analysis, which defines the Greek tragedy as a reconciling presentation of contradictions of reason, but anticipates the Hegelian view of the tragic poem as a presentation of the “tragedy that the absolute eternally stages with itself”, but the absolute here is vague, ideal. In the “foundation for Empedocles”, Hölderling explains how the harmonious opposition between art and nature takes place, presenting the process by which nature becomes more organic and man, more agorgic, more universal.
The concept of aorgic here is fundamental, and the reading here is by Françoise Dastur “Hölderling, tragedy and modernity” where he defines it as “it is nature without organicity in its infinite uniqueness”.
The organic is the art, which supposes, on the contrary, organization and, therefore, opposition from the parties”.
In the aorgic relationship that can be found the pandemic, the culprit is ultimately the virus, the control of the virus is questionable until you have the vaccine, we were in favor of social isolation and at certain times of #LockDown, however it is in nature devoid of organicity, a virus that until then was foreign to the man who altered it and became hominating, putting the civilizing process in check, and nature seems to fight back what humanity proposed.
Hölderling, Friedrich. (2008) The dead of Empedocles A Mourning-Play. NY: State University of New York.
If Europe (and the world) awakens
07
Aug
Peter Sloterdijk wondered if a Europe destroyed by war in 1945
could be seen as a metaphor for a modern empire and enlightened on the eve of a new century, it was a more optimistic environment of that time, but the philosopher had already predicted the violent turn of American politics and a possible world crisis.
The pandemic appears to have united Europe, except for the Kingdom that claims to be united, but it seems that it is not, a recovery policy that sustains the “domestic” economy, that is, those companies and businesses that traditionally support different European nations may have a new injection of spirit (and money) to recover.
Sloterdijk’s book If Europe Awakens, from 2002, had despite some optimism of a “new Europe”, the idea that Europeans do not turn to their historical-philosophical foundations to seek an orientation based on a “mitomotricity” that goes from against the founding myths that resulted from cultural, philosophical and political splendors that Europe considers itself heir, but can we think about this after a tragic crop of totalitarianism and world wars?
Edgar Morin prepares his world about the pandemic and despite all expectations, he always so optimistic now seems not to be, in an interview in November 2019 he stated that although “we walk like somnambulists towards a catastrophe”, he did not leave one tip of hope “resisting the dictate of urgency … hope is near.”
However, the climate is gloomy, with clouds hanging over China and the US, and relations with Turkey and part of the Arab world that is not so friendly with the West, what answer a boiling world may have, is the question that remains.
The spirits are high and the society of speed and fatigue does not seem to have given much space for a break, even though the pandemic imposing this on everyone, after 6 months it seems that there is no more balanced policy that convinces citizens to civility, compassion and solidarity.
In the midst of a rough sea, the disciples when they saw Jesus walking on the waves shouted “it is a ghost”, but soon He said to them “Courage! It’s me. Do not be afraid!” (Mt 14,26-27), the crisis is for the brave and the visionary, that leaders and leaders really fraternal and solidary help us in the post-pandemic and in a world with dark aspects.
