Arquivo para a ‘Information Science’ Categoria
Codified: For a Design Philosophy
22
Mar
Vilém Flusser was a Czech, brazilian citizen naturalized, died in 1991, who worked for about 20 years as professor of philosophy, journalist, lecturer and writer in Brazil and then back in his country of birth to the Czech
Republic.
His books are being republished in Brazil, including all his writings, and I began rereading The Coded World – for a philosophy of Design.
His work goes beyond the influences he received from Roland Barthes, Marshall McLuhan, because his philosophy is itself with elements of phenomenology and existentialism.
Rafael Cardoso’s introduction to the book highlights his change of thinking about the modern media he just saw born: “unlike most modern philosophers, who tend to focus their analysis on verbal language or mathematical codes, Flusser part of its gigantic power of reflection to images and artifacts, laying the foundation for a legitimate philosophy of design and communication. “(Flusser, 2017, p.10)
He asked deep questions about the virtual world: “If a tree falls into virtual space, and there is no one online, does it generate a warning message?” Returning to the famous question of the tree falling in the forest, the difference between the material and the immaterial? Can we exchange things for not things? “(Ibid.) And concludes with an even more fundamental question:” What destination should we reserve for the detritus generated by our frantic activity of transforming nature into culture? “(FLUSSER, 2017)
It approaches the paradigm of information, an essential basis for knowledge and education, “the end of history seems to be the end of our collective ability to fight against entropy, against the breakdown of meaning and form. If the basis of what we understand by culture resides in the action of in + form, then is not it paradoxical that the excess of information leads us to the breakdown of meaning? “(Idem)
The importance of the “concept of virtuality is perhaps the best and most elegant proof of how well Flusser was right.” (Ibid.), And can no longer escape this question, use in various forms of information, communication and the arts requires opening of this “black box”, the name of an essay published in the year 1985.
Flusser, unlike apocalyptics, admits that “at least in thesis,” which should become human well-being, becomes a slave to the forces of another “nature” which it helped to artificially generate. ”
Aspects of virtuality and a codified world are uniquely developed by the author and contribute to a more serene debate on new media.
FLUSSER, V. (2013) Shape of Things: A philosophy of Design, Reaktion Books, 2013. (pages and year em Brazilian edition).
Being and essence
14
Mar
Before examining what is the being and the essence in contemporaneity, let us examine
more closely its meaning in Thomas Aquinas, important for understanding the difference between nominalists and realists at the end of the medieval period.
For the medieval philosopher, the essence, which was called quiddity, is the ineffable of what makes existence possible, giving a thing its constitution of Being, which in turn possesses an existence as a possibility of existing in act, once created matter and form give it reality.
Unlike Aristotle, for whom there is a first mover that is god, his ontology starts from this premise, for Thomas Aquinas, the essence of God is his existence, and to attribute something to him would be to deny him, since he lacks nothing, is pure perfection and wholeness, so the effort of attributing to God properties is useless, to Thomas Aquinas he is pure Being.
In it the essence, called the quidity is the ineffable that would make existence possible, so that is where God gives things existence, or prefer a teleological concept, is the first matter / energy / form from where everything originates, could be said in words more modern, the existing nature in itself is an over-nature of its essence of a Being for itself.
By the way, Stephen Hawking passed away today, and said that the intention to create the universe was as important as the creation itself.
The essence (quiddity) not being the ineffable will correspond to names and concepts, whose existence is conceived by the nominalists, even if it admits the experience as a way to “perceive” reality, it will be at the beginning of this very sense-related thought, anyway today the substances, are linked to names, they are signed, and are subject to deconstruction as analyzed by Derridá and in the posts of last week.
For Aquinas there are two substances, where the essence also participates of the two substances, and the only cause of the compound substance, in the being the existence is “…. that first and simple substance par excellence, which is called God (AQUINO, 2004, p.10)
The second substance (abstract things) involves gender and species, essence participates in both. Essence does not partake individually of matter or form, it is found in both, composing in the world of sensible things individuation.
Thomas Aquinas also establishes two types of matter: signified matter, which is a first, particular, concrete, singular substance, of lesser extent, a modern example can be said to say Hydrogen and Oxygen, forming the water, already the matter not signed, which is second substance, universal abstract, of greater extension, a liquid potable, but it is necessary to see a greater complexity, if we are the human being.
“It is evident that the definition of man in general, and that of this man called Socrates, is differentiated only by the signed and the unmarked.” (Ibid., P. an individual as signified as the Man in his own nature, is also the man Sócrates, in his particular nature signified, where signified is nothing more than to place a sign.
AQUINO, S. Tomás, Compêndio de teologia, cap. II -3, p. 77, Col. Pensadores, SãoPaulo: Nova Cultural, 2004.
Clearing and Truth
09
Mar
Not by chance is the main work of Gadamer called “Truth and Method”, because the method
of finding the truth is in him that is the truth itself, the opposite is also valid, who uses a method even if it is “logical” not will have the truth, but only its instrumentalization.
Lewis Carol wrote “Alice in Wonderland” according to logic, but starting from false premisses, the first is Alice’s “dream,” in which, as in any other dream, the symbolic aspects are a “fantasy” and yet to reality lie in the human imagination and not in the reality of facts or possibilities.
As Heidegger called the clearing, that part with greater visibility within a forest, the century of lights called itself “enlightenment,” Plato wrote about the light in the bottom of the caves as a reflection of reality, one might ask today: where is the light.
We will not find it as they want the ethics of the justice of the law, the ethics of the state, or even more moralistic and fundamentalist ethics, a possible clearing to rebuild a world in which the need to see itself as a whole finds pieces of “clearings ” everywhere.
What we need to bring to the attention of great contemporary thinkers is to change one’s own mentality about the “clearings”, to change thinking, to rethink one’s own thinking, which is nothing more than a mere ideology tied to the past that has built many things, but there is now a demand for more substancial of seeing the world as a whole.
It is above all necessary to look at diverse realities with a look of respect and even admiration, violências cultures have their own ethics and wisdom, seeing them on the Western gaze is first and foremost a preconception to be overcome in a fusion of horizons.
At the time of the biblical scriptures in which the people mocked their traditions and truths, Nebuchadnezzar took the captives to Great Babylon, the great king of Persia Cyrus, was, without being a Jew had a temple built in Jerusalem for the God of the Jews.
As the biblical reading in John 3:21 says: “But he that worketh according to the truth draweth near to the light, that his actions may be manifested in God”, so that the truth which is light draweth nigh unto him, and the post-truth departs from it but gets further and further away from the “glare.”
The West has a hard time believing in the truth about the changes necessary for our time: more respect for cultural diversity, greater equality in the distribution of goods and respect for nature.
The Parable of Plato’s Cave
06
Mar
The first thing is that it is not a myth, if we understand mythos what is what would be
a simple narrative, but if present in the popular imaginary can be beyond then it is a parable, a metaphor where the cave would be a place of “knowledge ” or simply a dark environment, that we deprived of light, this light being the light of truth.
This “myth” is in the work of Plato entitled “The Republic,” book VII, where it seeks the light of the theory of knowledge, lead men to language and education to an ideal state, so it refers to the Greek polis in its formation initial.
In a cave people walk and through the shadows on the walls observe the way their bodies cast shadows, and in them the objects they carry.
Imagine that the prisoners were freed and forced to look at the fire and the objects that made the shadows, they would awaken a new reality, a new knowledge, but unaccustomed to the light would hurt their eyes and they initially would not see well.
Plato did not seek the essence of things in the simple Phýsis, as did, for example, Democritus and his followers, influenced by Socrates, he sought the essence of things beyond the sensible world, and this is the true allegory of the cave.
Dialogue is metaphorical, metaphorical dialogue always in first person talks between Socrates and his interlocutors: Glaucus and Adimantus, the younger brothers of Plato.
In dialogue, the emphasis is on the process of knowledge, showing the worldview of the ignorant, living common sense, and the philosopher, in his eternal search for truth.
It can be said that, at least in the West, this is the first essay on “truth.”
The zeal of the House and the “temple” reconstruction
02
Mar
In the biblical passage where Jesus expels temple merchants, vendors, and other traders of religious relics
of his time (Jn 2: 13-16), it is more common to remember the rope whip than the next passage that says (John 2,19 ): “Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it,” which seemed absurd since the temple was built in 46 years and how it would do it in 3 days.
The first part is best remembered by exegetes because there was the prophecy about what messiah that “Zeal for thy house shall consume me” (Psalm 69: 9) and therefore, in Jesus this prophecy is confirmed.
It is true that he spoke of his body rebuilding in 3 days, since it dies during the Jewish Paschua, which now due to the calendar does not always coincide with the Christian, but Jesus dies on Thursday when a lamb should be killed to eat it at the end of the Friday night, and at Christian Easter he is himself the lamb slain.
There is no doubt that the Battle of Guernica (1937), painting by Pablo Picasso is a symbol of our time, the war that shatters the BEING.
Seen as a sign of the times we must think that also the destruction and reconstruction of societies and cultures in our time have shortened, if this was done in more than a generation, today both destruction and reconstruction are fast and can take only hours.
The speed of information, which is often disinformation can destroy and build quickly, typical of the present times, is usually remembered only to deconstruct, a term used in philosophy, but there is also the construction in many areas of knowledge and sociability.
The Internet from the late 1970s to the 1990s changed the sociability of communication, the Web became popular content in 15 years, from 1990 to 2005 when Web 2.0 came on, and now IoT promises to change more deeply in a short time, but Has society changed? these are considerations of language and structure, but the “temple” is that of the “Being”, ontologically established and this is before any technology continues to be, with anguish and hopes.
It is a temple of reconstruction of the “temple” of being, but this means changing the structures, the form in which the content is expressed and “in-form”, in it will live the “Being” of our new time.
Desconstruction is not destruction
28
Feb
While the lay public thinks of the so-called postmodern malaise; or the non-being of postmodernity, since it only declares non-existences, absences and impossibilities, it is ultimately the recognition that is already in postmodernity, that something must be overcome.
But this new type of nihilism, the misleading and sometimes superficial understanding of deconstruction is not destruction, let alone “the end of history,” since it is always affirming, as in our previous posts, within Anglo-Saxon thought the the connection of deconstruction with literature and the way of reflecting Munslow’s historiographical work.
On the writing of history does not mean that it can not be performed to inform us the reading of Balzac helps to understand revolutionary France and antimonarchic thinking, as well as on the past and the mythical cultures that preceded current ones, part of the structuralist thought helped to understand better what followed the thought of modernity,.
So even in Anglo-Saxon thought deconstruction is a way of reflecting on historiographical work, on the process of transforming evidence and information from history into history, but it is now inevitable the historical questioning, the current work of historians to understand and explain the past through evidence facts, will help build the future.
If there is a clear demand for change, there is a clear need for a change of mentality and thinking about the very way of looking at history, of rereading literature, and especially of pointing out new solid paths to change, understanding deconstruction as destroying culture and favoring the general disinformation is part of the barbarism and not the seed of the ongoing change.
The Desconstruction and post-structuralism
26
Feb
The deconstruction in the philosophical sense of Jacques Derridá (1930-2004) can only be linked
to the idea of reading text of post-structuralism, and structuralism is linked to Levy Strauss, and poststructuralism uses the basic premises of structuralism itself, besides Derridá one can cite Roland Barthes.
Deconstruction in the sense that Derridá gave to his thought, can not be confused with a concept or a method, is precisely the idea that objectivity (as a method) can not be used to ground the deconstruction, the sense that seems more correct is the of a “strategy” to read texts and to interpret them, for this the strong connection with the matter of the grammar (one of the main works of Derridá is Gramatology).
Derridá then says of his strategy (not concept or method): “What interested me at that moment … what I try to continue now in other ways, is alongside a general economy a sort of general strategy of deconstruction .. to go through the phase of an overthrow [of what he calls the double science] … to accept this need is to recognize that in a classical philosophical opposition we do not treat, with a peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis, with a hierarchy of violence. .. to deconstruct the opposition is first, at a certain moment, to overthrow the hierarchy.” (Derridá, 1975, 53-54).
For him the traditional metaphysical thought (I would say the idealist of modernity is more deeply) is the logocentric, which identifies it in pairs: identity and difference (its main argument), reason and sensation, logic and rhetoric, male and female, but without a doubt its main one is speech and writing.
This is central here because it deals with what we consider to be essential in ontology that is presence, but its argument is different from existentialists, although it also deals with the oral (well before modernity) and writing (Gutenberg here). “The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, would be a history of these metaphors and of these metonymies (the different names we use to refer to a stable foundation or foundation from which we can think totality of a structure or even reality in general] “(Derridá, 1995: 231).
In positions Derridá affirms that the difference (different in Portuguese translation which is not unlike other translations) is that one must connect his idea of deconstruction “to a point of rupture with Afhebung and speculative dialectics” (Derridá, 1975, 56). ) in clear opposition to the idea in Hegel’s philosophy that one concept can be reduced to another, but there is a play, the incessant alternation of primacy of one term over the other, thereby producing a situation of constant indecision.
Here he penetrates into the discourse on structuralism: “As opposed to epistemic discourse, structural discourse on myths, mythological discourse must itself be mitomorphic” (Derrida 1971: 230) and on this discourse Levy himself Strauss wrote: “It will be right to consider it [his book] as a myth: in any case, the myth of mythology” (Lévy-Strauss apud Derridá 1971: 242).
Derridá’s emphasis on textuality and writing is not a break with philosophy, but rather a deeper understanding of the linguistic shift beyond games, and the fact that he is so closely linked to literature is the penetration of his reading into department of literature, more specific in the United States, and this orign.is anglo-saxonic thought.
“The game” for Derridá “is always a game of absence and presence, but if we want to think radically, we must think them before the alternative of presence and absence; it is necessary to think of being as presence or absence from the possibility of the game, and not vice versa ” (Derridá, 1971, 248).
The difference is thus in the “inside” and “outside” of the presence, its deconstruction thus seeks to relate to the mythology but to disassemble it, in an ethnocentric perspective, that makes prevalence of the conceptual thought on the mythical, of the logical reasoning on the bricolage , which is made by Lévy-Strauus himself, to think of myth as an original form of thought is to reduce it to episteme.
References:
Derridá, J. Posiçõe. Semiologia e Maerialismo. Tradução de Maria M. C. Barahona. Lisboa: Plátamo, 1975.
___ Margins of Philosophy. Campinas: Papirus, 1991.
___ The write and the difference. São Paulo: Perspectivas, 1971.
___ Gramatology. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1999.
The arts and adamic myth
20
Feb
We quote the work of Eça de Queiroz: Adam and Eve in paradise, but a work that seems to reflect very much
the Adamic symbol is the work of Ernest Hemingway, it seems the voice of a human experience, which seeks after the adamic fall of struggle against evil, to incorporate a search for redemption, thus symbolizing the mythical structure of the concept of original evil, the evil Adamic.
In other words, a new Adam, not just the figure of Jesus, but the recovery of a false “wise innocence,” a quest for simplicity of language, a second Adam.
What this has to do with the current reality, almost everything, is part of this asceticism of the “here and all its problems are solved”, and this movement in both philosophy and literature is a conscious or subconscious way of using an apology to the Adamic myth.
Character archetypes: Schorer, Murray and Frye are a comprehensive demonstration of this hypothesis, which was studied at Rice University by master student Anna Gayle Ryan, and can be extended to other archetypes used by Hermingway.
The author also wrote “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” about the Spanish Civil War, where an American soldier Robert Jordan fights alongside the International Brigades that support democratic government, with him is a group of guerrillas / gypsies, of Pilar, a woman with extraordinary courage, the dangerous Pablo and the beautiful Maria.
Despite the novel written in Cuba, it is possible to see a connection figure with the insertion of Americans almost in all the wars of the planet, not rarely taking the place of protagonist, as in Vietnam, in Korea, in the Middle East, etc.
The work was stamped on film, in the 1943 film was directed by Sam Wood, with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman (picture) in the main roles, which apparently is a revolutionary work hides American interests and the idea of an Adamic paradise represented by democracy , today it is possible to make this relationship.
It is the asceticism of the exercises, it carried to the extreme of the wars, and that impel an ideologies and a false “lost the Paradise” of democracy and others modern symbols.
