Arquivo para a ‘Cognition’ Categoria
Thereal crisis and the pain
30
Mar
The true crisis of contemporary society lies in the idea that it is
possible to abolish pain, the contradictory and even death, so it abolished not only the idea of a One God, but any possibility of a cosmogony that gives vent to the life- death-eternity.
Petr Sloterdijk gives this phenomenon the name that I think is more correct “immunology”, the idea that we can be immune to any “contagion” and some take it to “toc” and vice, to be correct with the author I give his definition: “Immunological systems are expectations of damage and violation, somatized or institutionalized, which are based on the distinction between the self and the stranger .” (Sloterdijk 2009: 709)
It is the most correct, in my view, since all this search for perfection, immunities, excess of moralism (it is different from the moral that is a true asceticism), make the man fall into a void meaningless, they want to blame the artifacts themselves who build by their unhappiness, a simple analysis is enough and we see that it is another insanity: things are what we humans lend to it, therefore the ball of time returns to the man and to the Being.
Two agnostic friends pointed out to me that I believe there is a supernatural world beyond the natural, and that by becoming bread and wine Jesus explains to us what human artifacts are, at least these, well these two friends pointed to the cross and said: meaningless.
What is meaningful is to ignore tragedy, the man before death, “who with life deceives” said Goethe, well: what the pain, thousands of alternative medicines have managed to extinguish the pain, someone has managed to rise again from the dead? the answers are obvious.
But it is not evident, a God-man who was Jesus, before death and the cross cried out, “My God, my God, why did you forsake me?” It is even more paradoxical to think that he was God, life since he had always called God the Father.
Perhaps he could even call this crisis of Abandoned Jesus, a society that wants to go forward, but lives returning to the past, to the point that he wants to revive The Wealth of Nations.
To ignore the tragedy in the Greek sense, even Nietzsche complained about it, is to ignore his departure.
SLOTERDIJK, P. (2009) Du musst Dein Leben ändern. Über Antropotechnik. Frankfurt, Suhrkamp.
Global village and Villages Cities
27
Mar
My still short Portuguese experience has already brought a new reflection, a great city
may be a village where there is some anonymity only because of a Western individualism, and there are already global villages, as McLuhan wanted, with global citizens.
The experience of a distance education group in Porto de Mós reflects this a bit, I thought to find students scattered with distant glances, as is almost always common in São Paulo, but I found students engaged, critical and concerned about their own formation, we had to close because the building was closing, and we who had left Lisbon needed to catch the bus, we almost lost.
Curious also because Portugal has genuine villages, it is not the small towns like Porto de Mós, but even villages, where people live from small farms (many wineries here), around a closer common life, but their young people accept peacefully and they call themselves one of the students of Porto de Mós: “I am from the village”.
The reflection goes then to what the big cities have lost, if I had to summarize I would say in a word reminiscent of Edgar Morin: “conviviality”, but I think there is something deeper: the lack of dreams, the excessive labeling, the mistaken preoccupation with the media (they help the villages to be global), more especially a lack of “lived life”.
The fact that it is in Portugal, especially in Lisbon, a life of bars and cafes where “conviviality” is realized and a village life where the life of the world is integrated by the modern means of communication, realizes a new phase of sociability where human values can actually be lived, more than the “relational” theorists who do not “coexist” think.
It is still possible to dream, fall in love, respect values of ethics and solidarity, but mainly to live them, which is essential.
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.
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 antropotechnicaland the ascetic non-spiritual
15
Feb
To define his antropotechnical, Sloterdijk will establish the relation of the relations within the
present religions like the most pure antropotécnicos procedures:
“If we reduce these” religions “to their essential characteristics, there are three basic complexes of which each has a clear relation to the anthropothermic dimension. First, on the dogmatic side: an illusionist exercise club, rigidly organized, whose members in the course of time are being impregnated with the conceptions of the milieu. Then from the psycho-technical side: a training roadmap for exploring all the chances in the survival struggle. We observe, finally, the top of the movement; we can see everything, but no “founder of religion”: in front of us is an unscrupulous, radically ironic, flexible on all sides, business-trainer “(Sloterdijk, 2009, 168).
Seeing also Scientology and the Olympic Movement as religions, he uses the concept of habitus, but criticizes the development made by both Pierre Bourdieu and Marx, solving the problem of how the social base or “infrastructure” would be reflected in “Superstructure” or how the general conception of society is able to penetrate the individual in a lasting way, this is his habitus done as an antropotécnico procedure.
In order to actualize and historicise his concept he resorts to the concept of habitus in Aquinas and hexis in Aristotle, which “… describes a seemingly mechanical process under aspects of the inertia of overcoming to explain the incarnation of the spiritual. They identified man as that animal who can do what he owes, if one cared in time with his abilities “(ibid., p. 289).
According to the author in presenting his own theory of cultural development, humanity itself, despite the fact that we find different customs and traditions in each moment of its history, did not follow the conservative identity script, so this question is false, although it is a reference for many contemporary authors.
The conclusion about this unspraced asceticism is training, letting itself operate: letting yourself be informed, letting yourself be entertained, letting yourself be served, letting yourself be cured, letting yourself be transported, and if this is, for the author, the being-there, its counterposition is not general negativity, but it should be the general epoché, letting itself be empty, there can be the being-there-not-being that could complement itself as onto-antropotechnical, light of the social habitus, re-reading the current anthropothermic conditions and capable of criticizing them, would be a total deflated being, a non-being-there that is also being.
SLOTERDIJK, P. Du musst Dein Leben ändern. Über Antropotechnik. Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2009.
The crisis and the ashes
14
Feb
The economic, political and social crisis is worldwide, but the Brazilian has more of an ash 
Wednesday than carnival, but it is possible to survive in the crisis.
A suggestive and profound book is the book in partnership with Edgar Morin and Patrick Viveret: How to live in times of crisis? (Bertrand Brasil, 2013), who suggest in the book “I risk the hypothesis that perhaps we have reached a moment of rupture” (page 22), but what rupture?
Ortega y Gasset recalls, “we do not know what happens, and this is exactly what happens”, says this about the difficulty of relating facts, the digital revolution, the resurgence of nations (Armenian, Kurds, Croatians among many others), the great Asian tigers jumps, finally a great range of new relations, and now new tensions and wars in Africa.
The pragmatists, who do not know the complexity, want to be practical, ignore the theory or repeat only a single author, the illusion of a “universal” theory, what we need Morin and Viveret: “the present, the real is not what it seems stable … one must be open to the uncertain, to the unexpected. “(p.25).
But the authors ask: “What then, the good news? An awareness of the breadth, of the complexity, of a new beginning. We are in a period of planetary crisis and we do not know what will come of it; what counts on the possibility of transcending this crisis will be good news “(p.27).
Viveret writes in the chapter “What will we do in our lives,” stating that we should go out of the way to preserve the best “, but paradoxically” maintaining the lucidity that there is the worst “(p.44), does not seem to give a definitive solution, but we can find the best of “traditional societies and civilizations”, and we must know these civilizations.
Emphasize the author that “it is necessary to reappropriate democratically and semantically the words ‘value’ and ‘richness’ whose root reich (in German) refers to the creative power” (pages 60 and 61).
He also recalls Karl Polanyi, in his book “The Great Transformation”, “analyzes the market economies that are legitimate for market societies that are dangerous, that is, the moment when commodification invades the whole social universe . “(P.61). The author gives us as a remedy to leave the infernal pair “excitement / depression,” to move toward another pair: “intensity / serenity” (p.76).
They end the book by saying that it is “necessary to grow in humanity.”
Still about evil
30
Jan
We do not complete our reasoning on evil, two analyzes can still be made, and if we wish to comment
Kant three analyzes: Kant, Paul Ricoeur and Gadamer.
I shall be brief with Kant (1724-1804), although a deeper analysis is required going to Hegel, the central point of his thinking in this question is that evil as to origin is unfathomable, but for him there is the “idealist” clear) of radical evil, and so would be the choice between a good or a bad maxim, from which all others derive.
Paul Ricoeur affirms that Kant explains freedom for evil and evil for freedom, in a tautological reasoning therefore, Ricoeur will look for in source origin, that is, the rescue of the concept of evil must come based on original sources, from them we find the existential origin of evil, and so it is in symbols and myths.
We are interested in putting the technique and technology (study and development of the technique) in question, analyzing the original anthropological steps, so the question that the nomadic groups of 200 thousand years ago of homo sapiens migrate and incursions into new territories in groups is meaningful because it reveals an intension of expansion and “occupation.”
In an embryonic way, this reasoning is also written in Paul Riocuer, the author speaks of the influence in his thinking of Jean Nabert of Spinoza’s lapidary phrase “desire to be and effort to exist”, and that exerted decisive influence in the thought of Ricoeur (RICOEUR, 1995, p.23)
Ricoeur calls his vision of evil as “small ethics” as that which the subject finds himself involved with, is with a mal-being, a bad substance, a bad doing that results from the mistaken use of his freedom, there is still in him a remnant of Manichaeism.
Only then does he go to the symbolic evil (name of his main work on the theme), on a path from the symbolic to the mythological, and from there to the texts, implies the concept of evil linked to culture.
RICOEUR, P. Da Metafísica à Moral (From Metaphysics to Morals). Translate: Sílvia Menezes. Lisbon – Portugal: Piaget Institute, 1995
