Arquivo para a ‘Cognition’ Categoria
Euphoria and Serenity
20
Jan
The opposite of serenity is not irritation or anger, this is the opposite of calmness,
the opposite is euphory, we have already posted the relationship between serenity and Phronesis, a Greek word that could be translated as practical wisdom, central in Hans Georg Gadamer’s book, and which in our view is approaches serenity.
There are those who believe in euphoria after covid.
This is because we live in times of impulsive reactions to the questions posed, in which after euphoria comes depression and discouragement, which at heart are always lacking in phronesis, though many draw attention to action, to practice, but detached from wisdom.
In Truth and Method II (second volume), prevailing statements about the dialogical structure of language thought to guide the world (and our worldview) and the clearer relationship between thought and language.
His clarification of the historical question was Gadamer who overcame Dilthey’s and others’ discussion of romantic historicity, his philosophical hermeneutics deepening as a hermeneutic of listening, listening and listening, the true view of the Other.
Gadamer in the second volume gives structure to a phrase by the Russian writer Leon Tolstoy: “There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth,” if truth is hard to tell, when practiced in wisdom Phronesis it opens a “clearing”, the Listening to each other.
Does the universe “hear” us, do plants and animals “hear” us, we need to understand their language and in this sense language is not anything just talking, it is listening.
In the video below Gadamer portrays the history of philosophy, but with phronesis and truth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KJNQoIXZ4k
Joy and dialogue
05
Jan
It is practically impossible to think of opposite 
poles, but in hermeneutic dialogue it is possible to put preconceptions aside to fuse horizons.
They are opposite poles that produce energy, for example, they are opposing forces that maintain equilibrium, the imbalance is precisely one force breaking the other as is the case of atomic fission, which produces a bomb, but still dominated is an energy.
Respect for the Other, in times of a pandemic, means observing the distance, wearing masks and showing solidarity with those who suffer the effects of the pandemic, also in the social question.
The importance of principles, or spirituality or even the divine among us, is necessary for this to be done without the possibility of rupture being the only alternative, and sometimes it is.
The joy we experience when we open ourselves to others, giving up even our own preconceptions (we all have concepts about life, the truth, etc.) is inconceivable, but always real.
The problem raised by the philosophy of the Other, which is not the same, is the first principle for authentic dialogue, in times of global citizenship it will be more than necessary, it will be the only rich source for dialogue and harmony between peoples and cultures.
The non-acceptance of the Other, whether culturally, socially or ethnically is the reason for current conflicts, beyond acts done without any ethics, but that Spinozian ethic that each has its purpose. Joy is possible even in dark times,
Hatred, disdain and reflection
07
Sep
It is not by chance that the brain region of structures such as the
medial frontal cortex, whose capacity to argue and therefore to dialogue is there, has as its core the putamen, the pre-motor cortex and the insular cortex, whose structures also participate in the perception of disdain and disgust, that is, the activation of hatred is physically in the brain close to those associated with judgment and reasoning, so you can both activate one as the other, there are both options.
Those who want to justify hate are full of arguments, are capable of even deep reasoning to act against the hated, but if the premise is dialogue, the same reasoning can be used to understand, care for and divert the violence of the other, as some martial arts teach, bypassing the “body”.
Hate will not disappear in the hope that external circumstances change, in general it does not happen, it is not a magic, to cure it, it is necessary to recognize diversity, its problems, as Gadamer would have to be aware of preconceptions, that is, of the fundamentals that start a disagreement or a type of credit, to recognize the Other in its bubble and to recognize ours, both as having preconceptions.
If we actually activate the reasoning, thinking part and put the disagreements on this level, we mitigate the hate part a little, but it is essential to ask and a part of our hatred would come down to reflecting in this way: “Why do I hate? What do I intend to achieve with this? What do I gain and lose from my hatred? ”.
I do not know of a situation that has been resolved in this case, in general it has led to a greater conflict, to a greater mutual hatred, if the objective is war we will probably get there, but I believe that for most people it is not, so what remains is to reflect , analyze the origins of such “evil” in its deepest bases.
Hate must be combated with the understanding and mainly that it leads to a new type of action, which implies to recognize in the first place that it exists and it is fostering on two sides and not by only one, in the manifestations of people and in their advertisements, denunciations are recurrent to say the whole truth is on this side and on the other just a lie, it is necessary to explain the consequences and that in fact those who benefit are those whose reason for existing and thinking is really “hatred”.
Wise people of various shades such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela or Mother Teresa of Calcutta with wisdom and intelligence in the face of enormous and absurd conflicts have been able to show that kindness and generosity, creativity and respect for others can lead to seeking a larger collective good and although a little longer will have more lasting fruits, with less violence and deaths, but because even in serious groups hatred persists, the answer is very simple. Encouraged by leaders and groups that live in political, ideological or religious bubbles, the main resource is the demonization of the adversary, identified with some disgusting aspect of evil: death, corruption, sexual, racial or gender violence, weakening of values or something of the like.
And once united in a group the fear disappears and this reduces the inhibition of those who hate to act in other ways not that of argumentation and exposure of facts, but violence against violence.
The leaders who incite this hatred, say they can no longer control it, but deep down they wanted it, develop this part of the reasoning that we say at the beginning near the part of the brain of the putamen, and released the hatred will be executed by the people who use the other part with less reasoning and more visceral, so the hate “explodes”.
What we should think about in face of unworthy facts, and at this moment there should be none greater than the pandemic, is that the feeling of fear and exhaustion by confinement is exploited not in achieving ways of relaxation and anti-stress, but in releasing it in violent ways, what are the consequences? and who are they favoring?
I think of the hateful ones, and not the loving ones who in fact have love for humanity and the most fragile appreciation. It seems like a path of no return, in the midst of a pandemic and with two tense elections approaching, the United States national and municipal elections in Brazil, I see little or no discussion about the pandemic and about those who die every day, bereaved families and compassion for them, neither on one side nor on the other. Fortunately, mortality levels have decreased, but the long weekend promises crowds, the village of cars to the beach was huge, and the pandemic?
In the pleasure of the text there is a dialogue
02
Sep
In the previous post there are Barthes’ expressions on
literature, writing and text, and we have already conceptualized the idea of inscription which is supposed to be supported, writing and the cognitive aspect and in the text the linguistic, artistic and “installation” aspect, and it is this is where his book “The pleasure of the text” is analyzed.
The book despite theoretical aspects is in fact a pleasure to be read, there is dialogue and mainly pleasant surprises, such as, for example, a semiological space, a kind of place between two margins: “an obedient margin, according to, plagiarism (…) the canonical state of the tongue and another movable, empty (…) these two margins wax, are necessary ”(page 40).
It yields more classic literature: “by Zola, by Balzac, by Dickens, by Tolstoy) it carries with it a kind of weakened mimesis: we do not read everything with the same intensity of reading; a rhythm is established, leisurely, with little respect for the integrity of the text ”(page 17)
Proust, Balzac and Tostói deals in a single line of ruptures, “the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that produces the pleasure of great stories: Proust, Balzac, Guerra e Paz will sometimes have been read , word by word? (Proust’s happiness: from one reading to the next, we never skip the same passages) ”(page 18).
He recommends how to do the real reading: “Read slowly, read everything, from a Zola novel, the book will fall from your hands; read quickly, in fragments, a modern text, that text becomes opaque, timely for our pleasure: you want something to happen, and nothing happens; because what happens to language doesn’t happen to speech: what “happens” *, what “goes away”, the gap in both margins .. “(page 19).
Contrast the text with the theater or the cinema: “In the text scene there is no limelight: there is no one active behind the text (the writer) nor before anyone passive (the reader); there is no subject and object. The text prescribes grammatical attitudes: it is the undifferentiated eye that an excessive author (Angelus Silesius) speaks: ‘The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which he sees me.” (pag.52).
It reveals the secret of another book of his: “Old, very old tradition: hedonism has been repelled by almost all philosophies; only the hedonistic claim is found among the outcasts, Sade, Fourier; for Nietzsche himself, hedonism is pessimism ”(page 74), the book quoted in the previous post that goes far beyond hedonism.
BARTHES, Roland. (1987) O prazer do texto. Trad. J. Guinsburg. Brazil, SP: Editora Perspectiva. (portuguese edition in pdf, in english edition pdf)
Authors and dialogues
01
Sep
I read a 1968´s text by Roland Barthes “The death of the author” 
in which he problematizes the concept, proposing it as “the destruction of all voice, of all origin”, he would also say about man today in a troubled moment of concept and events truly and “strangers” who are building “barricades in the texts”, what he said of his contemporaries (Alain Badiou and Jacques Derridá stated that without this concept no object is critically thought), and what he would say today, certainly his thesis I was right, and more so today.
It is known that Foucault gave pins to Barthes, but in Sade, Fourier, Loyola they were returned by inserting the reader in the discursive game and reformulating the question of authorship in another dimension: the body, this object of consumption of so many theories today, only in Barthes it finds some solidity (not liquid).
For Barthes the text is a body, an object of pleasure endowed with the ability to penetrate the reader’s life in fragments, generating coexistences between reader and author, or verbatim: “The pleasure of the text also includes a friendly return from the author.
The returning author is certainly not the one identified by our institutions (history and teaching of literature, philosophy, Church discourse); not even the hero of a biography he is… it is a simple plural of ‘charms’, the place of some tenuous details, the source, however, of vivid romances, a discontinuous song of kindness, in which we read death with all much more certainty than in the epic of a destination; it is not a person (civil, moral), it is a body. ” (BARTHES, 2005).
Barthes proposed in 1977 (Leçon) a distinction of the terms: literature, writing and text, which is particularly interesting conceptually, writing has something that is the manuscript an inscription in which a support, an utensil is supposed, in second place (although it is only of a didactic character) the cognitive sense, by which the installation is designated and the third the “linguistic” forms endowed with meaning that take on an artistic sense.
To problematize the question of “pluridimensionality” proposed by Barthes for literature, he initiates the so-called “genetic criticism”, problematizing the enunciative aspect of the term, aims to reconstruct a history of the text in its nascent state, seeking to find in it the secrets of fabrication of work, and thus it is explained what a text is and its relation to literature.
It is here that dialogue is established through language, without understanding the genetics of a text, there may be solicitude or dialogue, but it would not leave superficiality nor reach that level desirable for many contemporary authors to assume the preconceptions and establish new horizons. .
Barthes makes a valuable reflection on listening, distinguishing it from the physiological act of the mechanic of “listening”, giving it a statute of psychological act that can only be defined by its object and intention, a category so dear to hermeneutics although it is not exactly the same, has similarities.
The author makes a valuable reflection about listening, distinguishing it from the physiological and mechanical act of “listening”, giving it a status of psychological act that is defined only by its object and intention.
Barthes’ phrase is famous: “Any refusal of a language is a death” and an interpreter of this author explains the difference between hearing and listening: “[…] a poetic listening (‘brute’, as Barthes wants) aims not to imprison sounds in a hierarchical way, as in an insipid object of cold analysis ”(El Haouli, 2002), it is this aspect of hierarchical dialogues that dominate many who think they do it but do not do it, just want the passive submission of the Other to the their categories.
BARTHES, R. Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Paris: Seuil, 1971. [tradução: Sade, Fourier, Loyola. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2005.
EL HAOULI, Janete. Demetrio Stratos: em busca da voz-música. Londrina: Gráfica e Editora Midiograf, 2002.
Mystery is not ignorance
25
Aug
Stories of cultures, of cultural traditions that involve the imaginary
, and the imaginary itself are shrouded in mysteries, but they should not be confused with ignorance or superstitions, this is what can be read in the book of the almost centenary Edgar Morin “Knowledge, Ignorance and Mystery ”. there is a lot about knowledge, something about ignorance and the essentials about mystery, Morin’s dosage is perfect and a good remedy for the pandemic.
He is preparing a book for the pandemic, but as he always anticipates the story I hope to read and I believe he is one of the few who can talk about the new name or the post-pandemic precisely because he emphasized in one of his conferences that the health crisis caught us by surprise and put us on our knees.
In addition to planetary books like “Terra Pátria”, about epistemology “The Method” in six volumes, it is one of the rare ones that ventured to tread new paths in our global dilemmas through “To Exit the 20th century” and “Before the Abyss” However, in this 2018 book, your leap is over the mystery without slipping through the easy paths of belief and ignorance, questions both the fetish of reason and materialistic determinism, among its various works are the Transdisciplinary Studies done in a Center of these studies in Paris with the philosopher, important for the digital world Michel Serres, recently deceased, and proclaims that with discipline and excessive specialization we can move towards a new “obscurantism”.
He clearly separates ignorance from mystery, for him “ We can only apprehend the real through representations and interpretations. The reality of the outside world is a humanized reality: we do not know it directly, but through our human spirit, translated / reconstructed not only by our perceptions, but also by our language, our theories or philosophies, our cultures and societies ”, and for him, the mystery is equated by transdisciplinarity as “the contradiction to which all in-depth knowledge arrives is not an error, but the last conceivable truth”.
He values mystery as a path of discovery and knowledge: “Complex knowledge is the necessary path to reach the unknowable. Otherwise, we remain ignorant of our ignorance. The mystery in no way detracts from the knowledge that leads to it. ”
He calls our current environment as having a “culture of cancellation”, a more resentful half-sole in the old ideological patrols, and they now seem to intensify with the return of ideological polarization, which in the post-war created a constant tension in all of humanity. Which reminds you when children cover their ears and emit mimetic chants (he calls gutturals) so as not to hear interlocutors who contradict them (if you never know that you may be wrong, you will be right forever), so the polarization and radicalization seems to come from nursery education. It is not only the natural environment that needs biodiversity, the cultural environment and democracy also needs it, as Morin says, in fact “they depend on biodiversity”, we are willing to live with what is different or we want to eliminate it, the answer given in global scale is frightening, it is no mystery to ignorance and contempt for the Other.
Morin, Edgar (2020). Conhecimento, Ignorância, Mistério (Knowledge, Ignorance, Mystery). 1st. edition. BR: Bertrand do Brasil.
Simplism or complexity
06
Aug
William Ockham proclaimed that between two explanations about a certain
phenomenon one should stick with the simplest one, this principle became known as Ockham’s razor, but what to do with problems that are complex, as is the case of the current crisis of the corona virus, the more simplistic explanations are fake News, conspiracy theories or simple lies.
The complexity problem came from Biology, the ecological problem and the ecosystems showed that the phenomena are more interconnected than previously thought, there is a whole food chain going from the simplest, cellular to the most complex organisms and this includes the man.
However, the Arrábida Charter of Transdisciplinarity, signed by serigraphists Lima de Freitas, by Barsarab Nicolescu, written in 15 articles, highlighted “… the contemporary rupture between an increasingly accumulative knowledge and an increasingly impoverished inner being, leads to the rise of a new obscurantism, whose consequences on the individual and social level are incalculable ”(Arrábida, Portugal, 1994).
As method was Edgar Morin who thought about complexity, written in six volumes: Method 1 – The nature of nature (1977), Method 2 – The life of life (1980), Method 3 “The knowledge of knowledge” (1986), Method 4 – “Ideas: habitat, life, customs and organization” (1991), Method 5 – “Humanity of humanity: human identity” (2001), and Method 6 – “Ethics” (2004), however the epistemological question developed in a December 1983 lecture in Lisbon, which became a book, published in Portuguese in 1985.
In essence, thinking about complexity is outlined in three new concepts: the dialogical operator (understood as different from the dialectic), the recursive operator (which means understanding the consequences of acts, in a cause-effect relationship that produces a new cause) and the holographic operator (the part is in the whole and the whole is in the part, it does not separate all and part).
So it can be summarized from Transdisciplinarity to the Complex as an essential problem of humanism, we are 100% nature, 100% culture without dualism between them, solving the question of what we are as a “natural” man, as well as the ecological problem as well as the humanism are intertwined, the problem of nature is a human problem and the fundamental problem of man is his relationship with nature including the Other as part of his nature, regardless of race, color.
Tribute to Edgar Morin, 99 years old
08
Jul
July 8, 2020 Edgar Morin turns 99 years, with an impressive lucidity, recently described the current pandemic as: “We have to learn to accept them and live with them, while our civilization has installed in us the need for certainties each time bigger about the future, often illusory, sometimes frivolous ”, the same frivolity that Peter Sloterdijk states:“ In this frivolous sphere, we thought we were able to control nature with sophisticated technology, but the virus brought us to our knees. Will our way of being in the world change?”.
Of Sephardic Jewish origin (Jews who settled in the Iberian peninsula), with the original name of Edgar Nahoum, was born on July 8, 1921 in Paris, his father Vidal Nahoum was a merchant from Salonica (the former Thessalonica), and his mother Luna Beressi, passed away when she was 10 years old, adopted the code name Morin during the French resistance struggle and remained.
In 1978 she married Edwige Lannegrace, to whom she dedicated the book Edwige, the Inseparable (2009), after her death in 2008, about him, she said a sentence by Montaigne: “It was him, it was me”.
He is currently married to the 61-year-old Moroccan sociologist Sabah Abouessalam.
He wrote 1956, Le Cinéma or l´Homme Imaginaire, Minuit, Paris. In Portuguese: Cinema or the Imaginary Man. Lisbon: Relógio d’Água Editores, 1997, had previously written Year Zero of Germany (1946) and Man and Death (1951).
Among other books, the second book of great impact is The Lost Paradigm – for a new Anthropology, Zahar, Brazil, 1979. (French edition of 1973).
But his great work will be the six volumes of Method 1, the first “The nature of nature” publishing in 1977, the second of Method 2, “The life of life” (1980), Method 3 “The knowledge of knowledge” ( 1986), Method 4 “Ideas: habitat, life, customs and organization” (1991), Method 5 – humanity of humanity: human identity (2001) and Method 6: Ethics (2004), the years adopted are from the original French editions.
In total he published more than 30 books, in 1983 he held a debate in Lisbon where he put “The epistemological problem of complexity” which became a book in 1985 published by the publisher Europa América Portuguese.
His central ideas in addition to the problem of complexity are the return to the human (which is called the lost paradigm), the transdisciplinary thought present in almost all of his work and was a signatory of the Letter of Transdisciplinarity of Arrábida by the serigraphist painter Lima de Freitas, for him, the physicist Nicolescu Barsarabi, written in 15 synthetic articles, where we highlight:
“ … singly accumulative knowledge and an increasingly impoverished inner being leads to the rise of new obscurantism, whose consequences on the individual and social level are incalculable.” (Arrábida, Portugal, 1994).
In 1985 he wrote “The epistemological problem of complexity” (Europa America, 1985), which was conceived from a debate held in Lisbon, in December 1983.
The essence of his thinking about complexity can be thought of in three new concepts, among them: the dialogical operator (understood differently from the dialectic operator), the recursive operator (which means to understand the consequences of the acts, in a continuous cause-effect relationship because the effect produces a new cause) and the holographic operator (the part is in the whole and the whole is in the part, so do not separate the part from the whole).
So we must unite separate things, namely: reason and emotion, sensitive and intelligible, real and imaginary, reason and myths, and, science and art, another essential thing is to consider that we are 100% nature and 100% culture, the old nature paradigm X culture that philosophy asks about what we are, from contractualists, through evolutionists to socio-Marxists (wrote My left), Morin answers in a new way (from Pena-Veiga: The ecological awakening: Edgar Morin and ecology complex).
He has many questions about our future, the following lecture explains this dramatic moment, that the pandemic can demonstrate that this is how we should perceive it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3t7UFTpDHE
Post-truth time or hermeneutics
19
Jun
Hermeneutics is one that allows a worldview and an interpretation of different
facts, it does not mean manipulation of the truth, but exactly the unveiling of what ideologies and non-practical theories hide (there is no phronesis, practical wisdom).
What happens is that the search for the absolute spirit, the establishment of total truths was actually totalitarian, that is, they did not admit a different worldview, the dialog was simply linked to a pre-established truth, so there were truths a priori .
Knowledge for Immanuel Kant begins with experience, and reason would organize this matter according to its own forms, with the existing structures in knowledge, so information would be a way to organize the matter that comes from experience.
Although “a priori” is generally referred to as an adjective of knowledge, it is also used as an adjective to modify nouns, such as truth, so there would be truth a priori, and this is one of the tenets of idealism.
But the truth for centuries has remained veiled, it has always been established by certain forms of power, but this is the time when the truths begin to be revealed, not by journalists and controlled groups that are part of fans, but the armed crowd of photos and cell phones , cameras present in many surveillance places, but the big leap is awareness.
It is no coincidence that this is the great current topic, from philosophical hermeneutics, the question of historical consciousness that is no longer deterministic, romantic or dogmatic to the question of whether intelligent machines can be aware and ultimately “imitate” man .
For Christian culture this can go to another point, a time when the truth is revealed, according to the evangelist Matthew 10: 26-29:
“Do not be afraid of men, because there is nothing covered up that is not revealed, and there is nothing of hidden that is not known. What I say to you in the darkness, say it in the light of day; what you hear at the ear, proclaim it over the roofs! Do not be afraid of those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul! On the contrary, fear the one who can destroy the soul and the body in hell! ”.
Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who is not a Christian, said that the pandemic put us “all on our knees”, I would say that not everyone still has those who do not admit the mystery beyond our ability to understand and among the religious those who are not yet knees, at least out of compassion for those who suffer.
Saint John Damascene and pericoresis
05
Jun
Even for those who do not believe in the
concept of pericoresis, it is important because it makes the idea of relationship something more substantial, although it is already admitted that man is a relational being, the relationship is full of dualisms and non-Trinitarian interpretations (in the case of Christians) and can lead to indifference.
After resolving the Trinitarian dogma by the Cappadocian priests, who explained that God is One and Triune, are people (hypostasis) and maintain unity (ousia), Damasceno will dwell on the relationship between the three people and create a term also used in philosophy: pericoresis, interpenetration in relationships, that is, the possibility of listening to the Other not just out of respect, which would already be a step, but trying to penetrate and understand the reasons for his thinking.
It was João Damasceno (675-749) who studied this relationship of pericoresis, the term emerges proposing the articulation between the unity and the communion of the Trinity, it seems simple to say this, but difficult to understand and practice, since most relationships exclude the Other which is different, be it of color, race, creed or culture, far ahead of his time João Damasceno was a friend of the Saracens.
In his historical theological journey, he sought to find something to explain the relationship, which was in accordance with what the scriptures said of God and his relevance in history: the articulation between the concept of God that is triune and one, but each one being a natural person (prosopon) and God, João structured the intra-Trinitarian way, based on the Greek concept of person: hypostasis.
In the Greek word it means hypo, which is sub, underneath, and stasis, which is sub-posited; as if it were a support, but in the divine relationship this concept should be expanded and explained.
The term pericoresis emerges in this Patristic Theology, as the articulation between unity and communion of the Trinity, but going further, so the Father is one in the Son and the Son one in the Father, and both are one in the Holy Spirit, so there is an interpretation, it is more what a pure relationship it is to be in the Other.
The problem with some religious interpretations is the static relationship of the three, which is the dualistic relationship that comes from idealistic philosophy, where subject and object are separated and are relational by a type of transcendence, which actually has nothing to do with the Divine mystery nor is it religious.
In a deeper spiritual asceticism is the effort to understand and love the Other who is different, who is not my mirror, does not have my concepts and judgments, does not classify the world as I do, the great tragedy of our days is the lack of pericoresis , and thus of Trinitarian relations.
I think that the pandemic shows us this, even though there is a great pain that kills everyone and that sensitizes many people, that opens the heart to look at the suffering of the other, there are those that close themselves in groups, ideas and schemes to not look at the pain , the hunger and despair that the pandemic has generated, or we wake up together or perish together, staying in our trench is non-relational
