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Arquivo para a ‘Information Philosophy’ Categoria

Ethics, humanism and philosophy

31 Aug

Peter Sloterdijk told El País newspaper: “current life does not invite thinking” (on 05/03/2019) and the “era of humanism is ending” said Achille Mbembe Cameroonian postcolonial historian and thinker and humanism today is an issue of state and therefore of power, since its base is economism, a materialistic humanism prevails, not always considering human values.

Philosophy became the ideological justification of power, polarization led to extremes even the denial of authors whose authors swore to defend, Eurocentric epistemicide forgets its most basic foundations and surrenders to political polarization.

What did spinozian ethics mean? What is the critique of current reason? Sloterdijk points out the cynicism.

War was inevitable in a growing polarization and new economic order.

Current philosophy already thinks about humanism alternatives, Edith Stein, a phenomenologist and student of Husserl, explored the issue of Empathy, Heidegger, another student of Husserl, the issue of Being, Emmanuel Lévinas on Husserlian hermeneutic influence, and Heidegger defines humanism as beyond essence, that is , the humanism of the other man, which can be a starting point for the new humanism, and also Habermas (The inclusion of the Other) and Byung Chul Han (The exclusion of the Other) touch on the theme.

Religion is confused between ritualism, fundamentalism and the absence of basic humanistic values: love, solidarity and fraternity, so the biblical reading is manipulated and partial, secularism advances in a minefield due to the absence of humanitarian values ​​of faith.

It is hoped that in this crisis and fragmentation of civilizing development, leaders and influential men can find serenity, dialogue and balance for possible solutions.

Philosophy cannot be anything else that does not cooperate with peace, with civilizing progress.

 

 

The All, the Whole and the Trinity

25 May

It was inevitable that the idealism by segmentation that makes reality fall into some form of mysticism without a clear cosmovision, is the ontological quest that man has his completeness as a whole and what is the relationship with everything.

Heidegger argued about the precedence of the question of Being, idealist philosophy has this question, as we have already pointed out in other posts, but here we focus on Hegel’s apex, not only in the Phenomenology of Spirit, but in practically all writings there is a question of the Whole.

In each of the representations that constitute the Whole, he constitutes the Absolute, the Idea and the Idea of philosophy.

Hegel develops the apprehension of the Absolute through three moments: Art, Religion and Philosophy, so in a somewhat simplistic way it can be said that art is the personification of the Idea, the expression of the immediate split in Nature and Spirit.

Hegel (1995) describes that, Art and the intuitions it produced, need not only a given external world, to which images and subjective representations belong, but the expression of spiritual content, also needs the forms given by nature for its meaning. to which he must possess and foresee (Hegel, 1995, p. 342).

It is quite significant that Hegel developed a representation of the Absolute when he cited the Greek people, considered as the highest expression for the Greeks, and religion had an anthropomorphic form, that is, the gods were as carnal as men, so they are subject.

So this religion arises from the relationship between the Religion of Nature and its myths, while the relationship with the Christian Religion is the consciousness of the spirit that is infinite humanity.

The absolute spirit appears as humanity’s self-knowledge, being the conscience of effective history, and philosophy disentangles the instantaneousness of passions to surrender to contemplation.

According to Hegel (1995): “The absolute spirit cannot be made explicit in such a singularity of configuration: the spirit of fine art is, therefore, a limited spirit of a people, whose universality is in itself, when advancing towards the ulterior inheritance of its richness. , breaks down into a determined polytheism” (HEGEL, 1995, p. 342).

For Hegel, spirit is spirit only insofar as it is for spirit, manifesting itself.

Thus his spirit is for-itself in the sense of for-itself, little or nothing of the Holy Spirit who is totally in projection to the Other, whether in the Holy Trinity or in the human soul.

Hegel, G.W.F. (1995) Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (1830). 1. Science of Logic, 2. Philosophy of Nature, and, 3. Philosophy of Spirit. Transl. Paulo Menezes. Brazil, São Paulo: Loyola.

 

 

Spirit and Kant’s practical rationalism

24 May

Although Kant touches little on the issue of the Spirit, for him what exists is a practical “spirit” typical of the Enlightenment, there is an exception which is his reading of a Swedish author Swedenborg, a visionary of the suprasensible world of spirits, and that Kant treats in Dreams of a Visionary.

Kant’s metaphysics is linked to the dualism between subject and object, however, in this book he extrapolates the dogmatic rationalist nature and approaches the two worlds (body and mind) through a suprasensible world and thus, we would have the configuration of what would be the soul in contact with the body, through the spirit, that is, we have three entities: the spirit, the soul and the body, to establish the relationships he creates a very ingenious “psycho-physical” problematic.

Using Swedenborg’s views (which he assumes to be true) he imagines that the soul has contact with the other world united with the body that knows objects of sensitivity (the subject x object duality) while the spirit in its relationship with the soul also seeks to know such objects. subjects, since he is not completely connected to the body and remains in a spirit world, see that he has little or nothing to do with the religious spirit world.

Swedenborg sees himself as an “oracle of the spirits” who has his soul open to receive information, which makes him different from other men, so his soul communicates with the other world, through the connection with the spirit, there is in this a spirit world, and this spirit world existing, souls could communicate by a kind of telepathy, however this is not the case.

As he then explains this communication, there are limits to knowledge through the relations between the human soul and the supposed world of spirits, and such an argument is what he terms a “psycho-physical” trade between the world of spirits and the sensible world. by the soul that is found in man.

Very elaborate, however Hegel’s elaboration will be more complete and dialogues with the entire modern philosophical culture as well as with Christian theology, but to diverge, contrary to a thesis that approaches, Hegel’s will move away and find in the dialectical theses motivations to the Phenomenology of the Spirit.

Kant, I. (2003) Dreams of Spirit-see & Others Writings.- 1st ed. Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, PA: USA.

 

Asceticism and the dualism between body and soul

18 May

Already in Greek philosophy, self-discipline and self-control of body and mind (or soul) accompanied asceticism as well as the search for truth.

This quest and its corresponding asceticism is present throughout philosophy and even in literature, it is from Shakespeare’s Hamlet “there are more things between heaven and earth than vain philosophy supposes”, but it is from the same play “To be or not to be, this is the question” that refers to ontology.

Freud also said that the main task of an existence is to understand the mind, in contemporary philosophy there is the classic dilemma of separating body and mind (or soul), even Marx proposed to reverse Hegel’s path “from earth to heaven” , clear Hegelian sky.

What is certain is that the civilizing process depends on asceticism, on men as a community and on individual men, because otherwise they will not have anything to bring to the community if it does not have its own asceticism, they will take away the human misery and decadence that they experience.

The body and mind dualism is the one that separates the phenomena of the mind (which would be just mental, in the case of the soul, just spiritual) and the body that are physical and, therefore, are largely separable, there is also today a cheap philosophy that states that what I think will come true, I do not cite the books so as not to give greater popularity to this one without any theoretical or practical basis.

Husserl’s phenomenology will penetrate the ontological category of “intentionality” to remove this obstacle “the peculiarity by virtue of which experiences are experiences of something” (HUSSERL, 2010), and in § 14 of Cartesian Meditations (1931), repeats it o again, but in a more complete way: “The word intentionality does not mean anything other than that fundamental and general particularity of consciousness of being conscious of something, of carrying, in its quality of cogito, its cogitatum in itself” (HUSSERL, 2010).

Husserl and his teacher Franz Brentano recovered Aquinas’s category of intentionality for which the exterior in nature (esse naturale) is how things exist, the forms being distinct from existing in thought (esse intentionale), thereby supporting the mode of existence, in which things exist in the intellect (in intellectu) as “things thought”, but Husserl removes from intentionality the empirical basis and immanent objectivity.

In the previous post, we showed this separation between Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit as divergent and even opposite, by admitting that in a certain way there is in consciousness some form of awareness of something that is the basis for phenomenology and then in ontology and existentialism, there is in the consciousness a definite and transcendental form of what is external, but part of the intentionality of consciousness.

The transcendent is present in the mind (or soul) through intentionality, while the transcendental is of a higher order and only becomes knowledge if it can be understood within the transcendental mystery of existence, or we return to nothingness.

Husserl, E. (2010) Meditações Cartesianas. Conferencias de Paris. Phainomenon –Clássicos de Fenomenologia .  Portugal, Lisbon: CFUO.

 

 

Controversies of spiritual and philosophical asceticism

17 May

To deny asceticism, one resorts to the idea that it would be impregnated with “Christian exegesis”, however, the literature itself shows that this is a contradiction, since both idealist philosophy tries to remake a vision of what is spiritual in the “Phenomenology of the Spirit” and also more modernly Foucault ( ) will say that the Greeks in the Hellenistic and Roman times would be far from understanding the term we call ascesis. “Our notion of asceticism is, in fact, more or less modeled and impregnated by the Christian conception”. (FOUCAULT, 2004, p.399).

In Michel Inwood’s Hegelian dictionary, we find the concept of Spirit (geist): “Geist includes the most intellectual aspects of the psyche, from intuition to thought and will, but excluding and contrasting with the soul, feeling, etc.”, however Spirit in Hegelian usage has a meaning that is both similar and different from that used in everyday life (in the sense of the soul) and in philosophy, since there is also a “Trinitarian” meaning there.

As in all idealist philosophy, Hegel is a post-Kantian it is good to say, there is a search for overcoming the subject and object duality, for Hegel it is found in the Absolute Spirit, said in such a way as to propitiate an encounter between the subject and the object, forming an identity that takes place within the mutual relationship between subjectivity and objectivity.

While in Kant transcendence is what makes the Subject go to the object, in Hegel it is the Absolute that marks a meeting between the subject and the object, forming an identity that takes place within the mutual relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, but in both there is no Being in transcendence.

It is important to understand this relationship because in it what Hegel treats as an essential intellectual activity takes place, for the intellective apprehension both about the object (which is precisely the moment of alienation as a “going out of the Self”) and about the subject itself (the return to subjectivity after the experience with the object, that is, the Other as he sees it), thus different from the ontology of Husserl, Heidegger and others, who see in this an ontological relationship with Being.

For this, one must penetrate the Hegelian categories: in-itself, of-itself and for-itself, said in the Philosophy of Right as: “In effect, the in-itself is consciousness, but it is also that for which it is a Other (the in-itself): it is for consciousness that the object’s in-itself and its being-for-an-other are the same. The I is the content of the relationship and the relationship itself; it confronts an Other and at the same time surpasses it; and this Other, for him, is only himself” (HEGEL, 2003);

Many contemporary philosophers will see the Other, as something beyond the Self, and a for-itself something beyond the Self and the Other, a “for” beyond.

Although there are controversies both in Hegelian idealism and in his “Trinitarian” dialectical conception, it is important to note that for him the members of a community should always have among the principles the one that “has objectivity, truth and morality” (HEGEL, 2003, §258).

 

Foucault, Michel. (2004) A hermenêutica do sujeito. Transl. Márcio Alves da Fonseca; Salma Tannus Muchail. Brazil, São Paulo: Martins Fontes.

Hegel, G.W.F. (2003) Princípios da Filosofia do Direito. Transl. Orlando Vitorino. Brazil, São Paulo: Martins Fontes.

Inwood, M. J. (1997) Hegel. Dicionário Hegel. Transl. Álvaro Cabral. Brazil, Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor.

 

Being immanent and transcendent

03 May

These philosophy concepts are difficult to understand if we don’t put them into everyday life, rather rudely let’s think like this: what we have inside and defines us as your “I” is internal and immanent to me, what I have external and defines as the beyond me is “transcendent”, the Other and for those who have some belief in the Divine.

Of course, these concepts are not quite like that, the immanent is here that is inseparably present in a being or object in nature, it is inseparable from it and the being cannot be thought without it, for Kantianism, it concerns the concept and precepts of cognitive content.

The transcendent, on the other hand, is that which transcends the physical nature of being and things, corroborating with the immanent of Kantianism, this current defines it as that which is present in the object and outside the subject, something that is external to it and can only be known by “transcendence”, see the cognitive aspect present again.

Returning to the previous post, the categories in-itself, of-itself and for-itself can and are present in this type of immanence/transcendence based on idealism (Kant and later Hegel), which states “in the beginning, self-consciousness is pure for-itself”, thus it is absolute independence, it affirms that its transcendence in relation to everything that is for-Other, thus being is trapped in this binary Without-in-itself and for-itself, as Sartre will detect in his book “Being and Nothingness”.

Thus there is no alter, there is no Other purely outside and beyond being-in-itself, this stops in the sense of the Greek para (as paramedic, parameter, etc.) but a return to in-itself, thus self-consciousness it is linked to the ego and not to any cosmological or divine possibility.

Hegel states: “Self-consciousness is in itself and for itself when and because it is in itself and for itself for an Other; I mean, it’s just like something recognized. (…)” (Hegel, 1992, p. 126)

However, it is possible to define a relationship between immanence and transcendence without dualisms, so the being-in-itself, the one that defines itself internally and with its properties, can have a relationship with everything that is outside, the objects and the Other (which is in a sense plural form).

There is a transcendence outside, which is beyond knowledge, which one can have through the use of language, human relations and contemplative intuition, it is the Being-for-itself that completes and defines being-in-itself (gives it a transcendent identity), establishes a self-relationship with nature and with the Other and finds in divine contemplation a Being for-itself that is an origin of everything and beyond ex-sistence (ex – outside, sistence – strong, eternal ), which is essence for the previous definitions, as it is pure Being.

 

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2018) [1807]. The phenomenology of spirit. Cambridge Hegel Translations. Translated by Pinkard, Terry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Power and domination

21 Feb

We’ve written in our previous essays about the difference between power and domination, and while it can be wielded with wisdom and discernment, most of the time it devolves into the purest form of domination: control of opinions and narratives and the exercise of force for this, so it’s very easy to become pure domination.

Byung Chul Han in his book “The swarm” that talks about “psychopolitical” domination discusses the use of media and its control for this, current trends in the use of AI make this more dangerous.

We wrote in a previous post here, long before this war tension looms over our civilization:

“Symmetry, reciprocity, the understanding of human diversity and respect for it are almost always ignored in the models of the beginning of the 20th century, returning to them is nothing but a harbinger of a greater tragedy: the civilizational crisis with deeper roots than the previous ones”, we wrote this well before the beginning of the war in Eastern Europe.

Understanding that this is part of models of political domination of opinions and power narratives, Byung Chul Han’s analysis in his book: “What is power” shows the efficiency of using new media as an efficient and directing form of control even of our “freedoms”.

Among his analyses, we find among several discussions around modern and contemporary philosophy and the routine practices of postmodernity one that is particularly important and that escapes many analyses: gamification.

The game that, in general, motivates participants with its reward system that produces immediate sensations of success is also an exploration tool in psychopolitics. Social communication manifests itself in the grammatical lack of Twitter, in the affective appeal of the like and in the alienation promoted by influencers.

Thus, wanting, which is manageable according to our possibilities and the Other’s reactions, is trained in electronic games as a compulsive wanting, the desire is to “kill” the enemy, and the increasingly compulsive rhythm is being dictated by battles and speed in battles. answers.

Even if you can find advantages in gamification or think of it in educational terms: building a house, a farm or making knowledge games, there is a strong predominance of “battles” and domains of territories.

Han, Byung-Chul. (2018) What is power?. NY; Wiley. 

 

 

The idealist crisis and the ontological recovery

01 Feb

The evolution of the Enlightenment in both politics and economics culminated in Hegelianism, after passing through Kant’s critique of reason, it is the last great theory that seeks to realize an “integrated” totality, subject to “dialectical” contradictions (it is different from the dialectic of classical antiquity) and, according to his model, the ultimate aim would be to reach the full spiritual essence, which has little or nothing to do with religiosity.

It was thus the dialectical materialist asceticism that ended in an enormous void and in the “forgetfulness of being”, a term used by Heidegger to contradict the theories that since Descartes have emptied and criticized the metaphysical reading of reality, in the etymology of the word meta-physis, in this case the Greek, since its origin is from there, according to Aristotle it was the first science, it gave solid knowledge about things, and the study is confused with ontology, the “being as being”.

For Kant this study is confused with that of customs, it is a non-empirical or rational knowledge, his study on morality and “subjectivity” will start from this relationship with cultural customs and here there is already a strong dose of relativism, and deepens the dualism between Subject x Object, forgetting the “Being”.

So that which is subjective, theoretical or metaphysical is falling into disrepute and theories of objectivity, practicality and empirical realism grow, this will not be done without contradiction, but the very definition of idealist dialectic is this, the development of this concept from from yourself.

Plato defined dialectics as the art of thinking, questioning and organizing ideas (Greek eidos – image, we already posted something), so neither theory is out of the question (idealism is also a theory, by the way, not very practical) , neither metaphysics nor “being”.

The theo-ontology of the end of the measured age will establish the relations between the entity and the being, according to Thomas Aquinas he “is infinite. Therefore, if it becomes finite, it must be limited by something, which has the capacity to receive it, that is, by the essence”, present in his thesis “The entity and the essence”.

Amidst the crisis of idealist thought, see the previous post, a new current emerges from Franz-Brentano in the mid-nineteenth century, which resumes phenomenology and ontology working on the intentionality of human consciousness, which was a specific study in Thomas Aquinas, to try to describe, understand and interpret the phenomena as they appear to perception.

Brentano was Husserl’s teacher, who rereads Descartes and Kant, and elaborates phenomenology with a different meaning given by his teacher Brentano, seeks to separate what is empirical, so the phenomenon of the mental act is not something that appears instantly in the mind, but depends on the memory and elaborates from there the concepts of protension and retension, the discussion about what is consciousness today reaches the objects of Artificial Intelligence.

Heidegger was a student of Husserl, and from him one can consider both the linguistic turn (not all authors agree) and the ontological resumption.

 

Human consciousness and machinic sentience

27 Jan

Consciousness involves human spiritual aspects (in the idealist philosophy called subjectivity) and that which makes man have a true ascesis that elevates his character, his attitudes and his morals in a progressive learning scale, where the error is admitted, but corrected in a humane way .

Sentience is the fact that we have a conscious perception of our feelings, it is the ability of beings (humans, because we do not believe that even a sophisticated machine can have this asceticism), and in beings it begins to feel sensations and feelings consciously.

The less we manage to be aware of our feelings, the less we have sentience and the less ability to understand our feelings, the attempt to translate sensations (types of laughter, happiness, sadness, etc. to the machine), will always be subject to algorithms, even that are very sophisticated, and that is why I call it machinic sentience, since machinic consciousness is described in different ways by different authors.

The picture representation in XVII century, um dos primeiros estudos foi do matemático inglês Robert Fludd (1574–1637).

True human consciousness is thus that which allows us to reach levels of asceticism in different ways: altruism, putting ourselves in the other’s shoes, living a just life and appreciating justice, in short, a true spirituality that elevates us as humans, and is also that which is within reach of those who suffer from human injustice and barbarism.

For Christians, what makes us achieve true asceticism is described in the so-called beatitudes (Mt 5,1-12) which speak of the poor, the afflicted, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for justice, those who have the capacity of forgiving and deceitful with the clarity of the desire for peace: “Blessed are those who promote peace, for they will be called children of God”, so in all circumstances that one lives in dark days, it is necessary to promote peace.

The contours of intolerance and violence, not only in the war in Ukraine, but in almost the entire planet should worry those who defend peace.

 

 

Path and method

22 Jun

Every path requires a path, a path traced and directed to a scientific object is a method, there are more complex definitions, but in general they are already linked to a methodology.

A widely used definition is “scientific method refers to an agglomeration of ground rules of procedures that produce scientific knowledge, whether new knowledge or a correction or an increase in the given area”.

This type of general rule can fall either into logical positivism, a determinism about the sciences, or into an empiricist reductionism that sees the object under certain parameters.

Both Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn would argue against this view of method, Popper sees it as provisional knowledge, with successive falsifications, whereas Thomas Kuhn elaborated the idea of ​​changing paradigms that he calls scientific revolutions, either by one or the other science must have theories that evolve over time.

Just as the path itself can lead to falsifications or new discoveries, we prefer the term path, but in order not to fall into sophistry (theories that deny an episteme) it is necessary both to focus on the investigated object and to be open to the new, as in philosophy not it must begin with a hypothesis, but with a question that one seeks to resolve.

Looking at an object imagining something similar to the Other helps, but it does not solve the problem, it is necessary to investigate its variants and its pitfalls, in short, always questioning.

Both ontology and phenomenology, both are philosophically interconnected, and both admit metaphysics, have this reference in relation to the method and its object, as well as reject any methodological and theoretical dogmatism about the investigated object.

Also the historical path is not deterministic, in this respect Hans Georg Gadamer wrote questioning Wilhem Dilthey’s romantic historicism and retracing Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle, thus changing Dilthey’s methodological hermeneutics to which hermeneutics leads the interpretation of cultural changes within a historical context,

Both Gadamer, Antony Giddens and Boaventura de Souza Santos are concerned theorists concerned with developing a methodological approach to verify the fundamental conditions under which paradigm shifts occur.

For this, one must observe the “path”, understand the path and be open to a new horizon.

References:

GADAMER, H-G. (1998) Verdade e método: traços fundamentais de uma hermenêutica filosófica. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, Brazil.

GIDDENS, Anthony. (1984) Structuration theory, empirical research and social critique. In: _____. The constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity Press.

SANTOS, Boaventura de Souza. (1989) Introdução a uma Ciência Pós-Moderna. Rio de Janeiro: Graal.