The Russian counter-offensive and threat
29
May
The week promises to be tense in the war in Eastern Europe, Ukraine
has announced the start of its counter-offensive and Russia is threatening retaliation for Western aid in armament for this new phase of the war.
Peace is a long way off, now it’s really about the occupied territories the point of contention, and the whole question of the threat of borders and NATO advance is no longer the point, even if it is touched, the four partially occupied territories: Lugansk, Donesk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson are claimed by both warring countries, as well as Crimea.
After several countries announced arms and financial support for Ukraine, Russian threats escalated and threatened with “strategic” nuclear weapons, but any war on one of the NATO countries is immediately declared war on all and the conflict could escalate.
In the province (oblats) Belgorod in Russian territory was the first conflict inside the country in this war, right-wing and anarchist anti-Putin groups appeared on the scene, indicating that something is already happening inside Russia, the Russian government says it is under control, however evacuated the region.
The scenario is quite worrying, because the scale of the war and a possible conflict on the soil of NATO countries could mean an open start of a third world war, the Russian threats do not seem like a bluff, but a response to Western aid that prolongs the war and gives survival to the conflicting Ukrainian forces.
The displacement of nuclear weapons from Russia to Belarus and warships in the oceans indicate that the danger of responding to the West is real and could happen.
Although in the war in Ukraine it was demonstrated that there is a war capacity to intercept Russian hypersonic missiles, with nuclear charges no matter where they are detonated they will have a devastating effect on the environment and human life.
It remains for those who desire peace to ask that conflicts cease and that men return to serenity and respect for human life and nature.
What Spirit dwells in us
26
May
The search for something that is in the depths of our interiority and that no
machine or “artificial” intelligence can reach is everyone’s search and is now at the center of the discussion due to the possibility of intelligences such as chatGPT surpassing human intelligence, which is called the point of singularity.
However, there is something deeper that philosophy has sought through the Supreme Good, the cosmic Consciousness, the practical or Absolute Spirit, however, every man can experience a special type of interiority, endowed almost with a clairvoyance that is the Holy Spirit.
It may receive other names in different cultures, oracles or other names, but somehow, at some special moment in life, experiencing this “light”.
For the Jews, the feast of Pentecost took place 50 days after the Jewish Passover, a tradition that many Christians maintained, with a new meaning, the “descent of the Holy Spirit” to the apostles.
In Jewish tradition it was also a time of harvest and the memory of the delivery of the Tablets with the Sacred Laws, the Torah, to Moses, received directly from God.
It is not just a beatific life that leads to this presence, although that too is necessary, but the desire and openness of the soul for this wonderful effect to take place.
Modern man’s inability to reflect and be open to what is totally outside his human limitations makes this action difficult, but many achieve it through the exercise of true asceticism, explained in this way by Jesus to the apostles: “I must go, to let him come” (John 16:7), so this week’s rehearsals were preceded by the previous week’s: human asceticism and the ascension of Jesus.
There will be those who contest this presence in non-Christians, or certain denominations which are attributed the nickname of “sects”, but Jesus himself warns “there are sheep that do not belong to this fold” (John 10:16).
Finally, it is necessary to remember that the Spirit blows wherever it wants (John 3,8) and the event that was initially for a small group of apostles, called Pentecost, could one day occur to all humanity in order to see this clear and clear light. so we will see ourselves as we really are and not what we imagine ourselves to be.
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.
Spirit what is
23
May
In Greek origin the word is pneuma meaning “breath, seeing, air” in translation
into religious “divine breath, spirit” or “Holy Spirit”, in analysis of the theme that we developed in the previous topic it means a consequence of true asceticism, a “assistance” of the Holy Spirit in everyday matters.
In the Hebrew translation the word is “ruah” (or ruach), meaning something like “breath, air”, but distances itself from the Christian idea of the Holy Spirit as a person.
The Hebrew word ruah also has the meaning of “breeze” or “breath”, in Genesis for example: “They entered the ark with Noah, two by two of all flesh in which there was the spirit of life”, in Hebrew.
The Hebrew word ruach also has the meaning of “breeze” or “breath”, in Genesis for example: “And of all flesh, in which the spirit of life was, two by two entered Noah into the ark”, the translation in this case This seems out of place in philosophy or even contemporary ideas, but since the Greeks: Plato, Plotinus and more recently the Hegelians have explored several meanings close to this of absolute spirit, truth or life. the Hebrew word “ruach” is more than that.
This spirit, which is the Supreme Good of Plato and Aristotle, will be articulated in medieval philosophy and will reach Kant’s practical philosophy, to describe the greater good that human beings should seek, but in this case it is confused with Eudaimonia, which means ethics of happiness (in a sense not always “supreme”).
Plotinum (205-207 AD) is particularly important for having received influence from Plato and having influenced: Christians, Islamic, Jewish and Gnostic Enneads through his book, his influence particularly on Augustine of Hippo is quite strong, on the nature of the Intellect and on the “beyond the Intellect”, that is, the One, although it can be classified as having a metaphysical thought, it is in the articulation of the intellect with the soul, where the One can encompass both.
This idea was developed in Augustine of Hippo, for whom it is the dichotomous separation between good and evil (Augustine was a Manichaean) that makes the intellect distant would justify the episode of the Fall of the primordial couple? Augustine’s answer is for the insufficiency of good, that is, the absence of good gives rise to evil.
So it seems more correct in a broader sense, the idea of Spirit of Truth, of Wisdom and a category “superior” to the world of substantiality.ce itself from the soul, thus raising the question of how the Supreme Good would consent to the prevailing manifestation of the evil in the world? What would justify the episode of the Fall of the primordial couple? Augustine’s answer is for the insufficiency of good, that is, the absence of good gives rise to evil.
So it seems more correct in a broader sense, the idea of Spirit of Truth, of Wisdom and a category “superior” to the world of substantiality.
G7 meeting and Russian breakthrough
22
May
Reunited in Hiroshima, the G7 meeting was held: United States, United Kingdom,
Canada, Italy, Japan, France and Germany, to which some countries were invited, including Brazil, Australia, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Vietnam, Cook Islands (president of the Pacific Islands Forum) and Comoros (president of the African Union), Zelensky’s presence was as a special guest.
The countries reaffirmed their support for Ukraine, condemning the invasion, but Zelensky’s expected meeting with Brazilian President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva did not take place, concretely on the war, only American support promising more funding for weapons.
On the battlefield, Russia registered an advance in Bakhmut with the support of the mercenary group Wagner, who were praised by Putin, but the real takeover of the region is still controversial, Ukraine claims that there are still battles in the surroundings, in short, the war will continue and not s and knows in fact the limits it will still have.
The Ukrainians had celebrated the interception of the fearsome hypersonic missiles, and only one hit the country’s soil, it is still uncertain what kind of counteroffensive will be carried out, the Battle of Bakhmut may just be a bait already taken by Russia, the fighters and powerful tanks have not yet been used.
What is worrying is that on both the Russian and Ukrainian sides there is a real danger of the use of chemical and even nuclear weapons, Zelensky said that he would win the war before “that event” and on the Russian side there is open talk of the battle of Armageddon, Russia condemned the delivery of fighter jets to Ukraine.
In the diplomatic field, little progress has been made, Russia wants the territories it has already conquered, including Mariupol and a strip of eastern Ukraine, in addition to Crimea, which has been considered territory under Russian administration since 2014.
Hypersonic missiles with nuclear charges, increased army recruitment, food security and China’s alignment are concerns.
The scenario is still one of war and there has not been a more emphatic proposal for peace, the world continues with fears of a wider war.
Ascension in body and soul
19
May
Both human and spiritual ascesis are a question to be answered by human
existence, human existence because it implies advancing to higher stages of life, the photos of the current war in Eastern Europe ask us if we are heading towards this, the spiritual being the vision Greek, idealist or religious show that there is an issue.
For both, the answer is not simple, otherwise in thousands of years of civilizing process humanity would have already answered, the question that arises for the present day is how one can (and should) cooperate with the other, the bottom line is that kind of spirituality makes this cooperation productive.
The Latin motto “mens sana in corpore sano” which is from the Roman poet Juvenal, from the first century of the Christian era, indicates a precedence of the mind, however the mind, like the body, also ages and dies, which separates the idea of mind from soul, but only a spiritual ascesis that does not limit life to its bodily finitude can admit this immortality.
The soul is also not a specific theme of Christianity and other Abrahamic religions (Islamism and Judaism), Greek philosophers also speculated about the soul and Eastern religions that admit reincarnation (in the philosophical sense would be resubstance or reembodiment) also do not see the finitude of life.
Also in contemporary philosophy the speculations of objectification (or reification, res – thing) in the sense of finitude.
In the Christian way of seeing, a certain vision of separation of body and soul persists, but a deeper reading shows that the body can also be vivified by the soul, and the biblical proof for this are both the various appearances of Jesus alive after his death and resurrection, where he even eats bread and fish, as the maximum feast of his ascension.
The Christian biblical scene that is described in Acts of the Apostles 1, 9-10 is described like this: “After saying this, Jesus was taken up into heaven in their sight. A cloud covered them, so that their eyes could no longer see him. The apostles kept looking up to heaven as Jesus went up.”
For those who do not believe in the possibility of this life after death, all that remains is to consume life and this can also prevent a human asceticism.
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.
Asceticism as human and spiritual elevation
16
May
It is not specific to a religion and is also defined in philosophy, from the
Greek áskesis, “spiritual exercise”, derived from ἀσκέω, “to exercise”, consisting of a practice or more practices that promote spiritual development, the simple idea of renouncing pleasure or the primary needs, must be seen within certain contexts or periods, therefore it is not normal in general and also its opposite does not mean just sinning, but deteriorating, weakening when failing to do certain exercises.
Peter Sloterdijk, an agnostic, speaks of this despiritualized asceticism, in the sense that we are a society of exercises, but that they do not provide either a human or spiritual elevation, a clear example of this is the number of academies that grow in the country and in many places of the world. world, another example is the demonstrations of virility as a human elevation, of course it is important to take care of health, but sometimes excessive exercise and medication do the opposite.
From the human point of view, what we experience is a decadence that goes from the moral to the religious, subjects so clear until recently, today they are seen as having almost absurd controversies to the point of the immoral being considered “normal” and “human” and the religious being identified with atrocities.
The series of humanitarian crises could not fail to affect the economy, these are not simple market crises, they are at the epicenter of wars and economic fallacies, it is not necessary to be an economist to see that simplistic formulas do not work at either extreme: the wild capitalism and socialism without freedom and without human quality.
It seems difficult to recognize what a true spirituality would be then, even with the principle of asceticism, which means human elevation in social relations and in the inherent dignity of every human being, in respect for nature and in the preservation of its benefits, in short, in the love of life .
Even for the concept of peace we go back in history, the pax Roman seems to be the principle for many wars, whatever the one that subdued “enemy” territories to declare peace, not even the eternal peace of contemporary idealism is claimed, although it also have limitations.
It is a harbinger of great tragedies, including war, what is hoped is that somehow forces that still have a human and spiritual background can interpose this contemporary reality and revert the dangerous situation that we all face and few work for its reversal (photo about Pulitzer Prize in 2023).
