Arquivo para March, 2018
The Ontological Resumption
16
Mar
Heidegger shows in his work that a question never touched (at least in depth) in philosophy is 
the “sense of being,” and this was due to the fact that in traditional metaphysics all ontology has become an ontology of substance, Thomas Aquinas’s thought is important, for it has been separated from being of essence.
The primacy of the “thing” which we have made a relation to being-of-beings, is how the “thing” became represented for all that “is,” but rejecting its ontology, not only rejecting the thing abstract, but from the existential point of view, the question of being is eminently concrete, because “being is always the being of an entity.”
But what are the questions for modernity imposed on the Being? the essential determinations of being of beings?
It is a way which must lie below the empirical or ontic plane (of beings) and constitute the condition of possibility of the same, and these ontological structures explicit in the analysis of dasein (such as occupation, disposition, understanding, discourse) should not be confused with those who would be their ontological or empirical correlates (affection, desire, knowledge, language).
It is a matter of precedence, for they are neither unreal nor correlate, for every existential analytic “is before all psychology, anthropology and, above all, biology.” (Heidegger 1995, pp. 81)
In Heidegger in the being of man there is a pre-sence -, a fundamental ontological dimension. Indeed, in Heidegger’s text, the status of the claim is ambiguous.
The translation of Dasein was preferred as such, so that it is not understood as synonymous with “man” (the being-there has this ambiguity), in the ontological determination, what corresponds to the being of this being is his pre-sence and this is the question.
Their relationship may seem paradoxical, as many authors think, in the relation of being to being, but it is not, it is possible to live divinely this pre-sence, not nihil.
A biblical passage almost unexplored by scholars of the sacred text, is when approaching the Passover of Jesus, he says he is distressed and also sees himself before a “void”, in John in 27-28 it is written thus:
“Now I feel distressed. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour?’ But it was precisely for this hour that I came. Pai, glorify thy name! ” and the crowd, which was there and heard, said that it had been thunder. “I glorify him!”.
This question is not “nihil” but it is the Easter, pass to dead for live, not dead only.
—
Note: – This is translation from Márcia de Sá Cavalcante for “dasein”.
Heidegger, M. (1995) Ser e Tempo (parte I). Petrópolis: Vozes. (Brazil)
Being, things and gadgets
15
Mar
This name for digital devices appeared long before the internet and the digital explosion, is in Marshall McLuhan’s book of the 1960s: Understanding Media.
Many remember him only by the phrases: “the global village” and “the medium is the message,” but few are aware of his approach to the digital world, and still less is he aware of the profound influence that Teilhard Chardin’s Noosphere had on his mind.
Some of McLuhan’s main ideas consisted in foreseeing a more conscious world and even “even in a hyperconnected world, where everyone has the ability to regulate their own experience,” a reading different from the apocalyptic ones.
The ideas that many learn well but continue to forget are the advances and possibilities of a world increasingly a “village” and that problems previously veiled, such as being itself was veiled, are now exposed by the “media.”
We just have to choose to exclude these advances, if we are hiding in our minds somehow, our consciousness of being, of everything that exists beyond the labels and devices that they use, this is not for the internet, but for cars, designer clothes , finally, a series of objects of consumption that seem to qualify the being, and why there is so much emptiness?
This is what we tried to answer in the previous posts, too academic perhaps, but without revisiting human thought we can stay in the superficiality of “things”.
To escape from a difficult discourse about being, but one must recognize it as “being-of-all” I read a page from the Gift of the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who writes:
“For life today in America is based on the premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communication. It involves not only to family demands, but community demands, national demands, international demands on the good citizen, through social and cultural pressures, through newspapers, magazines, radio programs, political drivers, charitable appeals and so on. My mind reels with it…It does not bring grace; it destroys the soul.”
But she was not talking about the Internet, Makron Books released a book commemorating 50 years of the book in 2015, the book is from 1975, so this was already a previous reality of the internet, just as the gadget name was used by McLuhan in the 60’s .
This is a reality of Being, already observed at the beginning of the last century, the digital world is an additional component in the complexity of contemporary man.
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.
Onto-antropotecnical forest trailsh
12
Mar
We have already posted on the Veredas da Salvação (Veredas in portuguese is similar to
forest trails), a damned part of the time of the military dictatorship, and we have also posted on the novel by João Guimarães Rosa, Grande Sertão: Veredas (Big forest: trails), where farm foreman Riobaldo is in love with Diadorim, a love that confuses with beauty and fear, which speaks of a symbolic crossing of a river, and of the “devils” between a being and a non-being, thus said in the novel:
“... the devil exists or not … and goes on to say … Well, the devil regulates his black state, in creatures, in women, in men, even in children,” I say. (…) And in the uses, in the plants, in the waters, in the earth, in the wind … Manure … The devil in the street, in the middle of the whirlpool ... ” (Rosa, 2001, 26).
One could see Easter in the Brazilian oral tradition, but the novel is an exercise of orality in the midst of popular culture, like this crossing of a river, and we would find much significance not only for national culture, for politics, Guimarães Rosa, and a new time, where the passage means a “National Easter”, can you dream of it?
Interestingly, and even paradoxically, we may find the same concern in Petr Sloterdijk’s definition of the antropotechnics as proof that this is a national (in brazilian sense) and universal point.
Sloterdijk clarifies by giving three dimensions of antropotechnical: the illusionist side, rigidly organized, in which the members must exercise, the psycho-technical side that is the training script to explore the struggle for survival, and the third, an ironic, radically flexible side for all, a kind of business-trainer (Sloterdijk, 2009, 168).
The religious dimension, not that religious one in which one thinks of a reconnection of the beings and of these with God, considering and respecting the specificity and personality of each one, but that dogmatic one, owner of the truth (theme of our last week) and something “unscrupulous” .
Anthropotechnics as an unveiling of being, is to discover these masks and manipulations that exist in all spheres of society, from religion to politics, from common sense to scientific, and that at bottom has nothing to do with being and not with any kind of humanism.
Of course, everyone wants the integration of humanity, even Trump is going to speak to Korean, but the whole anthropoprofessional relationship is far from an onto-anthropotechnic, they use and abuse the post-truth, manipulate facts and narratives, from public lies to everyday lies .
It is not possible for such an environment to awaken the human, the relationship of Being and humanism.
ROSA, J. G. Grande Sertão: Veredas. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2001.
SLOTERDIJK, P. Du musst Dein Leben ändern. Über Antropotechnik (You have to change your life. About anthropotechnology). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009.
Clearing and Truth
09
Mar
Not by chance is the main work of Gadamer called “Truth and Method”, because the method
of finding the truth is in him that is the truth itself, the opposite is also valid, who uses a method even if it is “logical” not will have the truth, but only its instrumentalization.
Lewis Carol wrote “Alice in Wonderland” according to logic, but starting from false premisses, the first is Alice’s “dream,” in which, as in any other dream, the symbolic aspects are a “fantasy” and yet to reality lie in the human imagination and not in the reality of facts or possibilities.
As Heidegger called the clearing, that part with greater visibility within a forest, the century of lights called itself “enlightenment,” Plato wrote about the light in the bottom of the caves as a reflection of reality, one might ask today: where is the light.
We will not find it as they want the ethics of the justice of the law, the ethics of the state, or even more moralistic and fundamentalist ethics, a possible clearing to rebuild a world in which the need to see itself as a whole finds pieces of “clearings ” everywhere.
What we need to bring to the attention of great contemporary thinkers is to change one’s own mentality about the “clearings”, to change thinking, to rethink one’s own thinking, which is nothing more than a mere ideology tied to the past that has built many things, but there is now a demand for more substancial of seeing the world as a whole.
It is above all necessary to look at diverse realities with a look of respect and even admiration, violências cultures have their own ethics and wisdom, seeing them on the Western gaze is first and foremost a preconception to be overcome in a fusion of horizons.
At the time of the biblical scriptures in which the people mocked their traditions and truths, Nebuchadnezzar took the captives to Great Babylon, the great king of Persia Cyrus, was, without being a Jew had a temple built in Jerusalem for the God of the Jews.
As the biblical reading in John 3:21 says: “But he that worketh according to the truth draweth near to the light, that his actions may be manifested in God”, so that the truth which is light draweth nigh unto him, and the post-truth departs from it but gets further and further away from the “glare.”
The West has a hard time believing in the truth about the changes necessary for our time: more respect for cultural diversity, greater equality in the distribution of goods and respect for nature.
The truht and the soul
07
Mar
Truth inhabits the interior of man: this is the first approximation of ontological truth, in
Augustine, although the study of being was already present in Plato and Aristotle, the truth was for them more “soon” than “ontos”, since the Being and it should “contain” the truth.
This will have enormous relevance to human thought, for it means that there is something inside the man that must be “unveiled.”
In St. Augustine this tension meant that man only remains in outer things, and then empties himself of himself, then began a kind of asceticism where man recovers his intimacy, when he penetrates precisely that which is the inner man, and this tension will culminate at the end of the Middle Ages in a separation between the Being and the object, in fact, precisely this separation projected the man in the “objective”.
Augustine will say in his asceticism, “in overcoming you, however, do not forget that you transcend your reasoning soul. Therefore, I have addressed you to the source of the very light of reason. ” (St. Augustine, The True Religion 39, 72).
It is clear that the Augustinian cogito is not the Cartesian, who was distant in time and also in conception, but he prepared this way, the man desirous of the control of objects and of nature, the man who built his inner castle, is seen in the beginning of modernity projected on objects.
For Kant, the “agreement of knowledge with the object” means “the agreement of the understanding with the object that is grasped by it, namely, the phenomenon.” Thus the Kantian definition is effective if understood in the sense of Thomas Aquinas’s adaequatio rei et intellectus, and in this sense Kant’s theory of transcendental truth which implies the truth of transcendental knowledge in the end it is an ontology, the theory of being of beings, or of the object domain, [that is] of objects. ”
Although the thought of Thomas Aquinas, in his doctoral thesis on “Being and essence” things are still “adequate” reason, in Kant and modernity they will be “outside” and the ontology will be reduced to a onto -that is, only religious.
PAEK, Chong-Hyon. Kant’s theory of transcendental truth as ontology. Kant-Studien, vol. 96, n. 02 , p. 147-160, 2005
The Parable of Plato’s Cave
06
Mar
The first thing is that it is not a myth, if we understand mythos what is what would be
a simple narrative, but if present in the popular imaginary can be beyond then it is a parable, a metaphor where the cave would be a place of “knowledge ” or simply a dark environment, that we deprived of light, this light being the light of truth.
This “myth” is in the work of Plato entitled “The Republic,” book VII, where it seeks the light of the theory of knowledge, lead men to language and education to an ideal state, so it refers to the Greek polis in its formation initial.
In a cave people walk and through the shadows on the walls observe the way their bodies cast shadows, and in them the objects they carry.
Imagine that the prisoners were freed and forced to look at the fire and the objects that made the shadows, they would awaken a new reality, a new knowledge, but unaccustomed to the light would hurt their eyes and they initially would not see well.
Plato did not seek the essence of things in the simple Phýsis, as did, for example, Democritus and his followers, influenced by Socrates, he sought the essence of things beyond the sensible world, and this is the true allegory of the cave.
Dialogue is metaphorical, metaphorical dialogue always in first person talks between Socrates and his interlocutors: Glaucus and Adimantus, the younger brothers of Plato.
In dialogue, the emphasis is on the process of knowledge, showing the worldview of the ignorant, living common sense, and the philosopher, in his eternal search for truth.
It can be said that, at least in the West, this is the first essay on “truth.”
Oscar 2018 without surprises
05
Mar
Dunkirk took 3 statues, the best actor and best actress winners were Gary OldmanBest animation for Viva la vida, I did not like it.
(The Destiny of a Nation) and Frances McDormand (Three ads. for a crime).
My favorite Blade Runner 2049 took two statuettes (Best photography and visual effects), as well as “Three ads for a crime”, the Chilean film “A fantastic woman” with Daniela Veja was the best foreign film.
After 14 nominations, the cinematographer Roger Deakins finally at age 68 earned his first statuette.
Actress Frances McDormand was responsible for the most political word: “We all have a story to tell. Let’s talk about our projects, which need funding. We have to have inclusion”, referring also to his poster movie of a mother asking that the crime that killed her daughter be cleared.
Another appeal was the best director’s winner, Guilhermo del Toro, Mexican, spoke about the importance of “erasing the frontiers” direct allusion to Donald Trump.
Best animation for Coco (in portuguese The life is a party), I did not like it.
Jordan Peele became the first black man to win the Original Screenplay Oscar in “Run.”
