Arquivo para a ‘Information Science’ Categoria
Work, action and contemplation
19
Mar
Hannah Arendt considered that labor, work and
action are the three spheres of human life that make up the “vita activa”, a thought that we have placed around Byung-Chul Han’s essay, which Arendt also uses to complement the Vita Contemplativa.
It is not characteristic of modern man to think in this way, and this has put human thought and even scientific and religious thought at a standstill. Narratives arise as a consequence and not as a cause of this, it is through the fragmentation of human activities that the interpretation of reality becomes subject to a limited worldview.
Labor ensures the biological survival of the individual and the species (Arendt, 1995) while work, although it doesn’t individualize man, establishes a relationship with objects and with the transformation of nature, and allows him, and this is important, to demonstrate his craftsmanship and inventiveness (Arendt, 1995), but craftsmanship and inventiveness are not separate from thought, because there man conceives of his relationship with nature as a whole.
It was industrial work that destroyed this idea of the whole between work, labor and action, but noticing that artisanal work already included a contemplative vision, “Perché non parli?” said Michelangelo when completing his work “Moses”, meaning “why not speak?” (photo).
A little noticed detail, but certainly conceived by Michelangelo when he made his work, is the support of his right arm on the tablets of the law, we would say a first biblical codex, since the Torah was a scroll, and if compared to the statue of the Greek thinker, he is resting his head on his right arm, Auguste Rodin made his version around 1880.
Thus, work, labor and action can be united with the idea of contemplation, if we think of it as the conception of a previous thinker and included in the object, in this way we reunite and re-signify work and labor, no longer as an alienated attitude, but as an ontic Being.
Therefore, human work and its labor must be united with the ontological idea of Being, and it also means an act of love for humanity, for the Other and for the one who will use, conceive or just contemplate the action of labor.
Arendt, H. (1995). A condição humana. 7th. ed. Brazil, Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária.
Psychopolitics and authoritarianism
18
Mar
The contemporary view of authority is rooted
in the idea of the power of force, of money, of authoritarianism, of the manipulation of justice and public bodies in favor of the state, but all this authority is an authority that passes away as great empires did.
The Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, drawing on various authors: Nietzsche (Will to Power), Hegel (Principles of the Philosophy of Law), Luhmann (The Communication of Power) and his main influence, Heidegger (Being and Time), established the concept of psychopolitics.
The modern techniques of power through narratives that hide the real interests of power, mainly using the new media, is what Han called psychopolitics, which replaces and goes beyond Foucault’s concept of biopolitics.
Starting from Max Weber’s concept, quoting him: “power means the opportunity, within a social relationship, to impose one’s will even against resistance, regardless of what this opportunity is based on” (Han, 2019, p. 22, quoting Weber’s Economy and Society), this author already saw the modern trend of this psychological manipulation.
This approach replaces the concept of “domination” (we’ve already posted something about this here), which is “obedience to an order, which is sociologically ”more precise”, with the concept of a pure game of narratives that change this order according to temporal and social necessity.
The root of the idea of the modern state, different from the Greek one which was the overcoming of power as a sophism of manipulation, pure rhetoric, lies in Hegel: “in the longing for an absence of limits, for an infinitude which, however, would not be infinite power” (pg. 123), and what takes away the idea of the eternal and the transcendent, saying of its true limits is not an unlimited will for power: “Religion is fundamentally profoundly peaceful. It is goodness” (p. 124), but there are those who also see it only as a power, which is Hegelianism.
The biblical idea is the opposite of this arrogance, even if “religious” people use it, because “But it is not so among you; on the contrary, whoever wants to become great among you, let him serve you; and whoever wants to be first among you shall be servant of all” (Mark 10:43), “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled” (Matthew 5:6), there is no incitement to hatred, violence or the segregation of peoples or races in a good biblical reading.
So is the idea of the little ones, the children and the peaceful ones who are linked to the divine Kingdom.
Han, Byung-Chul. (2018) What is power? NY; Wiley. (citations is 2019 portuguese version)
Lasting peace or truce
17
Mar
No peace that subjugates a nation will be
lasting, oppression is always a situation of indignity for a people, but diplomatic negotiation is better than any war, this seems to be a principle for Ukraine today because of the lives lost (photo).
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio thinks along these lines: “to end this conflict in a lasting and sustainable way” and Putin too has stated a very similar view, since he has the upper hand and has conquered several Ukrainian territories by war and is recovering the Russian region of Kursk.
Peace cannot be the “pax romana”, as we have already analyzed in previous posts, the one that the Roman Empire considered when it dominated a territory, we have also analyzed the financial interests here, Ukraine is rich in rare earths and is also a major grain producer.
Russia stands to gain from the lifting of its financial blockade and the US will want Ukraine’s land, but Europe remains wary of future advances by Russia and NATO.
In the Middle East, Syria seems to be moving towards a constitutional path, a five-year plan proposed by Syria’s interim president Ahmed al Sharaa, and the Islamic State group has also lost its strength completely.
In the south of the Arabian Peninsula, meanwhile, the US is fighting against the Houthis, who are attacking American ships in the Persian Gulf. There too, it is necessary to avoid an escalation that is growing.
Iran denies this, but it is virtually certain from the Shiite position that there is some support for the group in Yemen.
The newspapers report that the Israeli cabinet is preparing to resume negotiations with Hamas, since the first phase ended on March 2. Hamas’ demand is also for a lasting peace and to overcome this current phase surrounded by mistrust.
There, too, we problematize the “pax romana”: without establishing a free territory for the Palestinian people, any agreement will only be a truce, and the war can be resumed at any moment if there is conflict or provocation on either side.
The scenario, although very delicate, is optimistic, diplomatic means are working and international political forces have come out of their immobility, hope is high.
Language, being and reconciliation
14
Mar
Since ancient philosophy, language has
been considered ontologically linked to Being, Plato’s World of Ideas (eidos) is nothing other than this, for Aristotle language is a “tool” of thought that allows us to represent reality.
However, modernity, under the pretense of realist objectivity, has ignored this simple reality where any action begins with thought and is transformed into language, in the words of contemporary thinker Heidegger, language is the “dwelling place of being”.
The “language of machines” or the codification of thought already expressed in a human “message” and transformed into codes, is not exactly what should be thought of in ontology, all of Heidegger’s texts and also those of the philosopher Byung-Chul Han complain about this technical view of language, but the 20th century began with the so-called linguistic turn.
Thus, the language thought of by Alan Turing and Claude Shannon is confined to the universe of machines, while language thought of ontologically is the “opening up of being” and the search for a universe of fulfillment and reconciliation, as Rainer Rilke (1875-1926) says: “We, the violent, last longer. But when, in which life, will we be finally open and welcoming?”
Byung-Chul Han recalls that the epic poem Iliad begins with the phrase: “Aira, Goddess, celebrates Achilles’ wrathful rage, which brought so many sorrows to the Achaeans, and cast countless souls into Hades.” We’ve already written several posts about the myth of Hades, the god of the underworld where souls go, and violence still marks our civilizing process.
Language as an expression of our thoughts and our interiority cannot be separated from active life (Hannah Arendt and Byun-Chul Han). Heidegger, who had a strong influence on both of them, sees it as a bridge linking the inside and outside of man, in such a way that speaking is thought of as an activity that takes place through man and is thus an ontological act (photo – A mural in Teotihuacan, Mexico, c. 2nd century).
This vision of language “through man” thus precedes its dissemination by the media and cannot be thought of as mere transmitters and receivers, since whatever the medium, it is preceded by human thought and language and in it the being “opens up”.
It can therefore be said that violence is an aspect of the lack of openness of being, motivated by thought and this is constructed by methodologies and ways of understanding reality as having a single path to violence where reconciliation may seem impossible.
Man and reality itself are not binary: Being and Non-Being, affirmative and negative, in man because he has sensitive and cognitive inner stages where the engines of thought are activated, and in reality because of the discoveries of quantum physics and the complex universe that astrophysics has created.
Communication, Shannon and data
13
Mar
Born in the small town of Gaylord, Claude
Shannon watched the creation of telegraphs using the barbed wire of the mountain farms in his region from an early age. He soon built his own telegraph, unlike the telephone companies of the time, in the countryside they continued to use barbed wire to send messages as telegraphs.
Shannon went to study at the University of Michigan, interested in mathematics and communication, where he discovered an advertisement asking for monitors for Vannevar Bush’s famous MIT Laboratory, where students finishing their theses were looking for a machine to tabulate data, unlike Charles Babbage’s historic English computer, this was just a machine to tabulate data, we could say a nascent data science.
The MIT laboratory was where “professors and students turned to the Differential Analyzer in moments of desperation, and when it was possible to solve equations with a margin of error of 2%, the operator of the Claude Shannon Machine was happy” (Gleick, 2013, p. 181).
The circuits of this machine were made up of ordinary switches and special switches called relays, direct descendants of the telegraph and predecessors of the logic of 0 and 1, whose logic was known to Bush, called Boole’s Algebra, which Shannon learned there.
This was where the data processed by Bush’s differential analyzer and the new logic of 0 and 1 came together, the other point we made in the previous post, the concern with an intelligible language for the machine and the problem of coding and decoding messages modified into electrical signals in the logic of 0 and 1.
Claude Shannon’s important point and great collaboration, expressed in his Mathematical Theory of Communication, determined how many coded signals would be needed to maintain the integrity of the message before the coding process.
The so-called Shannon Theorem determines that a number of signals twice the highest frequency communicated through the channel are required between the sender, who precedes the message sent, and the receiver, who decodes the signal and reconstructs the message. In order for this message to remain unchanged, the number of signals in Shannon’s Theorem must be observed.
The noise problem depends exclusively on the distance and the way the signal is captured and sampled (segmented into a quantity that complies with the theorem) while the sender and receiver problem depend on the transformation of the message into a signal (i.e. the transformation of an analog signal into a digital signal and vice versa).
The message sent and the message received depend only on human sources, as the sender and receiver are electrical, digital or photonic devices. Quantum devices are already being developed and could represent greater speed and signal integrity.
Gleick. (2013) Informação: uma história, uma teoria e uma enxurrada. (Information: a history, a theory and a flood). Trad. Augusto Cali. Brazil, São Paulo: ed. Companhia das Letras.
Thought and information technology
12
Mar
The origins of almost all realities (if we don’t
consider the divine and eternal) come from human thought, the idea of politics in the Greek polis, the idea of the “art of war”, from the law codes of Hammurabi (1792 to 1750 BC) to modern contractualists, compilations of religious treatises, epistemological constructions of the sciences and computer science could not be left out.
In 1900, when physics and mathematics seemed to give an air of precision and certainty to the scientific universe, positivism still reigned in law, a German mathematician David Hilbert proposed 23 “final” problems for mathematics at an International Congress in Paris in 1900.
Among these was the second problem: the finitist solution to the consistency of the axioms of arithmetic, which together with the sixth problem, which was the axiomatization of physics, seemed to give a logical and precise finish to all of science, but there had already been a return to the question of Being through Husserl and Heidegger, and this returned thought to human complexity.
Kurt Gödel, a member of the Vienna Circle who eschewed this logic and for this reason was called a neologicist, proved the incompleteness of the second problem, that arithmetic was either consistent or complete, thus remaining in a paradox, called Gödel’s Paradox.
The question of arithmetic is important to understand the origin of the idea of algorithms, which were previously just formulas like Bhaskara’s formula (for 2nd degree equations), complex solutions to differential equations, while physics had the problem of formulating all of physics in a single theory, the so-called Standard Theory of Physics, but quantum mechanics and the theory of general relativity, where time and space are not absolute, changed this scenario.
The meeting of Claude Shannon and Alain Turing, who were working on secret projects to code transmissions (made for the Roosevelt government) and decode the Enigma machine captured from the Nazis (Turing’s secret project) will create a new event.
Unable to talk about their secret projects (Gleick, 2013, p. 213), they talked about Gödel’s paradox and wondered about the possibility of the machine elaborating thoughts, even if it was something limited, and both developed theories about language and algorithms.
While Turing devised a state machine that, through back and forth movements of a tape recording symbols, would produce intelligible sentences, Shannon worked on a similar model (using a theory called Markov chain) that, through finite vocabularies, could compose sentences and formulate broader ideas.
Alain Turing’s definitive contribution was the so-called Finite State Machine, whose model was completed by Alonzo Church, while Claude Shannon left the contribution of a Mathematical Theory for Communication, his theory establishing the amount necessary for the information transmitted not to be damaged, but within the limits of the “machine”.
The reductionist idea that it is possible to carry out actions without a necessary, elaborate, meditated and tested thought is part of current pseudo-scientific narratives.
Gleick. (2013) . Informação: uma história, uma teoria e uma enxurrada. (Information: a history, a theory and a flood). Transl. Augusto Cali. Brazil, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Thinkers with full bellies
11
Mar
Modern society is characterized by an absence
of serious developed thought. What is called “critical thinking” is nothing more than the rejection of any thinker who tries to think outside the ideological bubble, or of vulgar and superficial narratives.
They don’t know about the great classical works, even those professed by Kant, Hegel or Marx, deep literature by Zolá, Vitor Hugo, Proust, Balzac, Camus or more current ones like George Orwell, James Joyce, Gabriel Garcia Marques or Jorge Luís Borges, Eurocentric in their shallow knowledge, preferring the contentless criticism of thinkers who challenge all current thinking as fragmentary: Heidegger, Gadamer, Peter Sloterdijk and Byung-Chul Han.
Their bellies are full of food that fills their stomachs, but it’s far from being the kind of food that provides a deep and well-founded critique of current thinking: decadent sociologism, little meditation (read Hannah Arent or Byung-Chul Han on the Vita Contemplativa) and little knowledge of even the late Enlightenment that they profess.
At most, they know Bauman’s liquid and Eurocentric thinking, Foucault’s biopolitics or Jean Jaurès’ revisionism, they don’t know Edgar Morin’s transdisciplinarity (he calls this partial intellectuality blind intelligence), Barsarab Nicolescu’s third-included and the quantum physics revolution (it’s no longer a binary dualism), thought is dated in modernity, and they don’t know its origin in ancient Greece.
It is necessary to deny authors who propose new paradigms so that their narrative, based on authors from the last century, is coherent. At best, they talk about original cultures without knowing the great modern African and Latin sociologists such as Achille Mbembe, Franz Fanon and Anibal Quijano.
The belly is full of a culture that is already outdated, even without the necessary updating and without a complete reading of the works on which the positions are based, the psychopolitics of Byung-Chul Han, the spherology of Peter Sloterdijk (Sphere I: bubles) and the transdisciplinarity of Morin cannot be understood, it is a shallow and incomplete revisionism due to the fragility of the readings.
The easy criticism and consequent narrative are based on the chaotic social and cultural scenario we face, without a complete and radical analysis that escapes the bubbles we are trapped in, that understands and updates thinking beyond idealistic dualism.
In fact, we need a few words and thoughts, but profound ones that are forgotten or dormant: what kind of hope do we have for today’s society? What kind of beliefs do we have that don’t involve power and domination? What kind of science is it that deals with the whole man so that it can also deal with every man? What is our relationship with the Other? (Lévinas, Ricoeur, Buber and others).
Without reading Thomas Aquinas, they will remain readers of only one book, without reading St. Augustine, they will not come out of Manichaeism, because evil is the absence of Love and Forgiveness.
Han, Byung-Chul. (2019) O que é poder? Trad. Gabriel Salvi Philipson. Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes.
Sloterdijk, Peter. (2019) Esferas I: Bolhas. Trad. José Oscar de Almeida Marques. Brazil, São Paulo: Estação Liberdade.
Morin, Edgar. (2015) Introdução ao pensamento complexo. Trad. Eliane Lisboa. 5.ed. Brazil, Porto Alegre: Sulina.
Positive signs in the Middle East and negative in Eastern Europe
10
Mar
After the first phase of the negotiations, Hamas
spokesman Abdel-Latif Al-Qanoua said on Saturday (08/03) that he sees positive signs in the negotiations for a second phase of the ceasefire with Israel, and 50 former hostages ask Netanyahu to implement a broad agreement on the conflict, Israel and Hamas disagree on the future of the conflict.
European countries, increasingly independent of American opinions, support the plan to rebuild the Gaza Strip. Unfortunately, last night Hamas militants came under heavy Israeli bombardment.
In Eastern Europe, the situation is becoming more and more dramatic, both on the battlefield where Ukraine is threatening to lose more territory. Putin wants to reach the port city of Odessa, which will make the war on the Black Sea more violent, and also to surround Ukrainian troops in their invaded territory in the Kursk region.
Ukraine has suffered huge bombardments, its energy infrastructure is increasingly compromised, Trump has withdrawn his support and now Ukraine no longer has the satellite images that allowed it to monitor the movements of Russian troops.
Although both sides of the conflict talk about ceasefires, the battlefield, the involvement of Europe, in practice, the ferocity of each side only grows and the militarization of Europe frightens any serious analyst, there is a bleak future in this conflict.
In a meeting between Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US representative to the United Nations (UN), and Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira, held in Brasilia at the beginning of the month, Linda said that any solution in Eastern Europe must consider support for Ukraine, and this shows America’s good intentions.
The problem is that Russia rejects any concession of territory while Ukraine wants all of its territory back, as we’ve analyzed before there are interests in the region’s rare earth reserves, and this leads to an impasse.
The agreement on the transportation of grain, which passes through the Turkish-controlled Bosporus Strait, met on Friday (07/03) with no conclusions yet, but it is valid until May.
The statement by President Makron of France, who said that Russia was a “revisionist imperialist” referring to the Soviet period, was answered by Putin, who said that France had forgotten what “happened to Napoleon” who lost the war on Russian soil.
The world climate continues to be tense, but there are still efforts to come up with a proposal that will bring the opposing sides to a diplomatic negotiating table.
Pain and its meaning
04
Mar
In his book “Palliative Society: Pain Today”,
Byung-Chul Han characterizes the being who has “objectified pain” as one who lives in a “purely bodily affliction”, because being “endowed with meaning [Sinnhaftigkeit] pain presupposes a narrative that inserts life into a horizon of meaning”, so without a bodily life linked to a greater meaning it is “a bare life emptied of meaning, which no longer narrates” (Han, 2021, p. 46).
He quotes Walter Benjamin, in Images of Thought, where he shows the healing power of narration: “The child is sick. The mother brings her to bed and sits down beside her. And then she begins to tell stories” (p. 47), at least that’s what used to be done in the old days, before taking the child to the doctor.
As we quoted in last month’s blog: “today we live in a post-narrative time” (p. 48), “the hypersensitive human being of late modernity, who suffers senseless pain … that wave of pain in which the spirit recognizes its impotence sinks rapidly today” (p. 49).
He also quotes E. Jünger’s “On Pain”: “The human being deludes himself that he is safe, while it is only a matter of time before he is dragged into the abyss by the elements” (p. 55).
Jünger explains that pain cannot be made to disappear, he speaks of an “economy of pain, if placed in the background in this way, it appears hidden in an ‘invisible capital’, which ‘increases with interest and interest on interest’. Paraphrasing Hegel’s “cunning of reason”, Jünger postulates the “cunning of pain”, in this way, it is not autocratic power, but pain that has not been objectified in some form of domination.
He writes, quoting Jünger: “No claim is more certain than that which pain has on life. Where pain is spared, equilibrium is restored according to the laws of an entirely determined economy” (pp. 55-56).
Thus it is possible to speak, according to the author, “borrowing a well-known expression, of a ‘cunning of pain’, which achieves its goal by all means” (p. 56), “… the scattered light with which pain, in return, begins to fill the space” (idem), only if this light is outside our objectified “security” (that linked to material goods and comforts) can we find another, more lasting type of ‘conquests’, which are not objectifiable.
The author goes on to explain that “in a palliative society hostile to pain, silent pains multiply, crowded into the margins, persisting in an absence of meaning, speech and image” (p. 57).
Far from narcissism and selfishness, we find a meaning to pain, we find more than a meaning, a reward that comes from our solidarity, from the encounter with the Other and with the true happiness of life in the family, in the community and in true security.
Han, B. C. (2021) Paliative Society: pain today. Transl. Lucas Machado, Brazil, Petrópolis: Ed. Vozes.
Pax Romana and conflicts
03
Mar
President Zelensky’s Friday meeting (02/28) with Trump
and his vice-president in the “oval office” of the White House was a reaffirmation of Trump’s policy of Pax Romana, where the weakest must yield to the strongest, and also asked for Zelensky’s gratitude to the US, not unlike the policy for the Middle East, the control of the Palestinians by Israel and the US.
Zelensky reacted by taking part in the summit in London on Sunday (02/03), reaffirming Europe’s position of support for Zelensky, Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Great Britain stating that it was “a unique moment in a generation for the security of Europe” which fears further advances by Putin on the continent, all countries are militarizing.
The Roman Pax was the mere surrender of its adversaries by force, this is the tactic of both imperialism and colonizations, which are still happening in the contemporary world. After the meeting, Zelensky also met with Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s premier, who said she wanted to build a bridge between Italy and the US and a future conference with the US.
The idea of a new ceasefire agreement in the Middle East (which ended on the 1st) now involves the American proposal for control of the Gaza Strip and Israel has suspended humanitarian.
At the beginning of last week, Turkey’s stance in support of Ukraine came as a surprise, with President Recep Erdogan stating that Ukraine should take part in the negotiations and that Turkey controls the passage of ships through the Bosphorus Strait (photo), through which Russian ships pass on their way to the Black Sea, and that Turkey is also important for peace in the Middle East, where it can be a key player, and that the country is a member of NATO.
The Turkish autocrat also said that he is in favor of the full return of Ukrainian territory: “The return of Crimea to Ukraine is a requirement of international law,” a very difficult point.
The situation is fragile in Ukraine, but Russia needs to demonstrate a real interest in the desire for peace, just as it distrusts NATO, European countries fear a future advance on Europe, already a conflict area like Transnistria in Moldova.
Every war involves some kind of plunder, and the interest is in Ukraine’s rare lands.
Trump has also expressed imperialist interests in Greenland and even territories in Mexico and Canada. Remember that a large part of New Mexico and nearby states once belonged to Mexico (Texas, California and parts of neighboring states). The Guadalupe-Hidalgo agreement of 1848 established the new American border, after several wars following the annexation of Texas in 1821.
It is necessary to establish the rights of peoples and many international treaties already speak of respect for borders and respect for national laws, interferences are always conflictual, we must also remember the stateless peoples (the Kurds and the Palestinians, but there are others).
A new world of solidarity requires a new vision of borders, where emigration is not a crime and each people can live in its own territory and exploit it commercially without wars.
