Arquivo para February, 2023
On Wrath and War
14
Feb
There are those who defend that Wrath and its maximum expression, war, are necessary and in many situations unavoidable, the Roman philosopher Seneca, in addition to theorizing the issue and writing a treatise “On Wrath”, in three books, in the first theorizing, in the second it deals with advice and examples to avoid it, since for him anger is always harmful.
The work concludes with tips on how to calm yourself and other people and summarizes the work, according to the philosopher a great man should never be angry.
A must-read for today is Wrath and Time: psycho-political essays, by Peter Sloterdijk, in which he not only deals with an overview of the issue in Western thought, we add Seneca on purpose as a counterpoint, the author shows that it it is valued for being the driving force of heroes and warriors, and it is said that this force was lost with the repression of anger, but is that really so, or was it transferred to the State that monopolized it.]
Love in the Time of Cholera is a book by Gabriel Garcia Marques from 1985, where the backdrop is Latin America, the genre is fantastic realism and talks about a love triangle that lasted for more than 50 years, contrary to what it seems and suggests, there is true love behind the triangle.
During all his life Florentino Ariza loved and waited for more than fifty years Fermina Daza, the novel can remember and is a good parallel with Candido or Optimism, by Voltaire (which is from 1759) and which ironizes the provincial spirit of Candido in the eternal waiting for his beloved Cunegonde, who finally conquers her at the end of her life, in this case there is no triangle, but an impediment due to the nobility of the maiden and the vulgarity of the commoner.
The novel takes place at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, and there was both the plague of cholera and war, and this brings a very current reality, it is not an idealized love in a contradictory context (cholera and war), Fermina was married to renowned physician Dr. Juvenal Urbino, the narrative is intelligent because at the beginning of the book the doctor dies, and then the author will put the story of both and a repressed love, and what love is like in a mature phase.
This maturity and despite the fantastic realism, according to the author himself would have a lot to do with the love story of the parents themselves, and although it speaks only of human love, it brings a positive reflection on what love is, how much it can be true and mature when his whole life is tried.
In 2007 it was filmed and directed by Mike Newell, I confess that I haven’t seen it, but I believe that the little interest from the critics is a thermometer of how good it is.
MARQUEZ, Gabriel García. (2016). Amor no tempo do cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera). Trans. Antonio Callado. Ed. Special hard cover, Br: Editora Record.
SENECA. (2014) A Ira: sobre a tranquilidade da alma (On Wrath: On the Tranquility of the Soul), trans. José Eduardo S. Lohner, Br: Ed. Penguin-Cia.
Sloterdijk, P. (2012) Ira e Tempo: um ensaio Político-psicológico, Br: Estação Liberdade.
Geopolitics of war and “viruses”
13
Feb
Not even the serious earthquake in Turkey and Syria, with more than 25,000 fatalities,
managed to appease the spirit of anger and revenge that shakes the planet.
The war suffers a scale in a world geopolitics, the Russian ship Almirante Gorshkov (supported by the supply freighter Kama) passes by the coast of Europe and goes towards the USA (recalls the crisis of Pearl Harbor (1941) and missiles in Cuba (1962)), after “spy” balloons now there is a wave of shot down Unidentified Flying Objects, which are not aliens, but just unknown devices.
In the aspect of the pandemic, some changes in the behavior of the syncytial virus (complicated name for a multinucleated mass of cytoplasm formed by the fusion of originally separate cells) that occur in seasonal viruses, now seem to have an atypical and out-of-season behavior, in the southern hemisphere, for example, we are still at the end of summer.
Returning to the war, the frigate Admiral Gorshkov was sailing towards Africa, it was accompanied by a supply ship that followed this route, but the frigate changed course and is now heading towards the United States which causes an increase in tension in the war that it was not only from Ukraine and Russia, some Russian missiles also crossed the southern border of Ukraine and headed towards Moldova, the feeling of total war is growing.
It is good to remember that the frigate heading to the USA has the fearsome and unbeatable Zircon hypersonic missiles, even being in international waters, it can reach a distance for the American east coast to be reached safely, which will certainly aggravate the international and imminent crisis conflict.
After the balloon event, the one accused of being a spy in American airspace, two other “unidentified objects” (which do not have aliens) were shot down, and this Sunday (02/12) one of these objects was shot down in China, everything indicates espionage and ongoing counterintelligence.
In terms of the Pandemic, these extra-seasonal viruses cause concern due to their severity and volume, Marcelo Gomes, coordinator of InfoGripe (from Fiocrus), says that these viruses called RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus) can be attributed to two factors: the mitigation of care with the pandemic that also curbed other viruses and the lack of control in collective environments, which prevented greater contact and circulation of viruses socially.
Both in war, concern grows both with peace and with the possibility of new pandemics, the international climate remains tense, recently there were barbs between French Prime Minister Makron and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who was excluded from the meeting with Zelensky.
Essence, fairness and ethics
10
Feb
When discussing the “good life”, a classic concept that Paul Riocour takes up in his reflection
on fairness, he links it to classical philosophy where “it is “the desire for a ‘good life’ with and for others in just institutions”, and there are problems in democratic institutions, because the concept of being has been abandoned.
The reflection we made on the question of Being in Heidegger, we left a link to what is essence thought of as acting, where the concrete universal differs from the conceptual or representational universal, acting is a question and cannot be reduced to the concept , then it involves an interiority, and not just a subjectivity or objectivity, as Hegel wanted.
Thus justice depends on the Just, who questions and corrects his actions, in this consists the Platonic dialectic, seen as the art of thinking, questioning and organizing ideas (Greek eidos), and this implies correcting the action by thinking, not just punish, but modify thinking about action.
We cannot just question the legal aspects of justice without each man, including those who have committed crimes, being able to rethink and act anew in the conduct of his own life and life with others, of course there are repeat offenders, but both the norms for this are clear, for correction no.
What is fundamental in Hegel’s ethics, and this urge permeates Rawls’s thought, is that we must always choose between two evils, when it is possible to correct both the lesser evil (from which greater evils originate) and the greater evil in order to rethink society. and justice, including the distribution of social goods.
In the long speech of Jesus to his disciples in Mt 5,17-37, he explains that their justice should be superior to that of men, he begins by explaining that he did not come to abolish the law and the prophets, but to give it greater amplitude, then he explains about not killing, and says that even those who are angry against their brothers are already sinning, in short, they give each “legal” teaching greater depth, and thus it is not mere legalism, but the full fulfillment of what is just.
Those who condemn the norm, and remember only the fact that the Pharisees did not allow Jesus to heal and do good on the Sabbath, undoubtedly a hypocrisy, cannot forget that for Him there were “divine laws”, which corrected human action and that the modern society wants to abolish.
Full freedom also means full justice, and there is no just society without just men, it is necessary to educate them, this has been thought since Plato.
Ethics and fairness
09
Feb
Understanding what ethics is, as we have seen in previous posts, is fundamental to understanding
what is fair, but great ethics has developed for contemporary idealism, and while neocontractualism is just a truth, the concept of ethics is essential for understand idealistic values.
The Hegelian system can be seen in three parts (only didactic): the idea, nature and the spirit, the idea is the general plan of modern philosophy (on the left the New Hegelians and on the right the Old Hegelians), nature is part essential to discuss contractualism and its aspects, the spirit is divided into: objective, subjective and absolute.
While the absolute refers to the idea of “pure”, objective and subjective dualism are part of contemporary dualism, as for justice, the objective can be divided into: abstract right, morality and ethics.
It is a theme that is too long and profound, as is typical of Hegelian thought, but since consciously or unconsciously it dominates a good part of thought (at least the one that is elaborated on, it is common now not to elaborate and just say, like “simple as that”) , ethics is essential to read it.
In Principles of the Philosophy of Law, in paragraph 142 he writes: “that my will be placed as adequate to the concept and with this and with this overcome and with this its subjectivity preserved”, as is typical of idealism thought, objectivity overlaps subjectivity ( which is characteristic of the subject) and roughly speaking it can be said that here lies the fundamental difference with Paul Ricoeur, as he focuses on what is fair (subjective) and not justice.
The supposed passage from an abstract subjectivity to a substantial one and from a universal to a concrete one is accomplished in this way, ethics is the very definition of what is the good and what is of the subjective will, in the hermeneutic method, there is an intentionality and not a subjectivity .
Thus morality is reduced to social morality, or objective morality, as an individual it can only be realized in community and denies interiority or subjectivity.
However, there is no justice without fair men, and in many moments of history men had to break with tyrants, with false values that were hidden around apparently altruistic social proposals, but whose project was one of domination, we have already differentiated power of domination .
In the hermeneutic perspective, both the unconscious and the imaginary are relevant to understanding a context, and they are almost always based on preconceptions, and the individual wonders how to insert himself in a story, he also wonders what objective action he should perform.
Regarding universality, phenomenology rejects the idea of the “pure” abstract, Ricoeur sees a conflict between solidary particularism and that only a deepening of intercultural aspects can conclude which alleged universals will be recognized universals in different cultures.
When dealing with the issue of justice from the social perspective of goods, Ricoeur deals with the problem by analyzing the purely procedural conception made in Rawls, for him the problem of this conception lies in the fact that it does not realize the heterogeneity of the goods that are involved in terms of their distribution and for which institutions they were defined, political usage, proselytizing and duty-bearing define many institutions.
Ricoeur also analyzes the conflict of duties in the context of solicitude, and uses the case of Medicine in the context of Amnesty International, if he were writing now in the pandemic he would have a beautiful example to question this issue of the distribution of goods, as were the cases of vaccines .
The fair and the legal
08
Feb
Legality is evidently based on laws, even if strange or questionable, it is a kind of “social contract”
for living in society, which is why the topic of the previous post is relevant, even more so if one considers that the highest point of what is legal today is neocontractualism.
Paul Ricoeur wrote in two volumes on the subject, done in the form of essays, in the third essay he deals with John Rawls’s Theory of Justice, not only attests to its relevance but also he claims what almost all of us said at a time in our childhood : “this is unjust” and then this precedes the sense of the Just as they also concern not only the law, but all people.
Ricoeur in the preface of Justo 1 already pays attention to the detail that the theme is connected to the idea of what is ethical, in classical philosophy, is “the desire for a ‘good life’ with and for others in just institutions”, and here he situates A good part of the civilizing crisis has emerged: the mistrust that exists in democratic institutions.
The expression “good life” taken up from Aristotle is a qualifier of good in a strict ethical sense, so the good is inseparable from the good of the other, under the penalty of being nothing more than a reprehensible selfishness, which degrades the subject in the sense of moral plane.
Put more clearly, the relationship with the other is constitutive of self-awareness, and it is, to a certain extent, ethical beyond the legal and merely moral.
Where only obedience is decisive, even with an inner conformity to the moral Law, which can be unavoidable in every ethical life, this has something beyond the Law, in it man desires the Good, aspires to the Good for himself and for others, in a sense that also becomes consciousness for the other.
It is obvious that this finds a barrier in our faults, the bad feelings, the bad actions, the violence that mark society since the most primitive times, in this sense it is necessary to awaken the conscience of guilt, which contains in it the very conception of judgment, this means to limit yourself.
For this reason, the theme of freedom is relevant, what kind of freedom is desired and under the pretext of what conception of justice, thus “fair institutions” are needed.
So this is Ricoeur’s formula: “: « the desire for a good life with and for others in just institutions », without them the legal becomes revolting.
However, it must be said that “institutions” are not limited to the legal aspect, in the same way that what is fair cannot be reduced to what is legal, it is necessary to analyze it in depth.
To explain this, Ricoeur says what is awareness of the Law: “Applying a norm to a particular case is an extremely complex operation, which implies a style of interpretation irreducible to the mechanics of practical syllogism”, that is, simple logical rules, there is not one subjectivity, but a transcendence.
When giving a lecture to the L’Arche Association (founded by Jean Vanier) that cares for exceptional people, he addressed the theme and spoke of respect when dealing with the difference between the normal and the pathological, relying on the works of Georges Canguilhem, who discusses the epistemology of biology.
What is fair, how did this concept develop
07
Feb
All contemporary tension involves something beyond politics and economics, the tension
over the conception of social contract and power.
The concept of justice is linked to modernity by Contractualism, through construction from the thought of Thomas Hobbes through John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, they take man out of his natural state and exercise him to live in society, they will differ in this way on the concept of who man is: evil by nature and must live under guardianship, he is influenced by society and develops in it, or he is a “noble savage” that society corrupts.
The set of natural rights and the theory of the state of nature is what is called jusnaturalism, whose problem is that the state of equal rights generates conflicts and the state must arbitrate, but in modern society it is together with the liberal utilitarian thought .
Thus, they are all linked to a social contract established by the state, and the first major criticism is made by Hegel, which he will understand by general will is a pure, idealistic concept, maintained in a rational instance, above any agreement or contract.
Max Weber will make a deeper reform by differentiating domination from power, since domination is the acceptance of power that can be given in three ways: legal, traditional and charismatic. However, in none of them the use of force is dispensed with and the social question is not always remembered.
John Rawls develops and re-elaborates a Theory of Justice based on classical contractualism, determining the rights and duties that must be carried out in order to carry out the so-called “cooperation of peoples” and offers contributions to the social issue that is a source of conflicts.
However, current theorists such as Emmanuel Levinas and Martha Nussbaum, question each one in their own way, if the social contract does not have a serious limitation, Nussbaum points out, for example, the problem of people with mental or physical disabilities, the problem on the issue of animals and forests.
Levinas starts from the ethical requirement that exists in Rawls’s work to elaborate the idea that we must refuse the temptation to impose our will and strive to establish peaceful compromises, and thus rejects the idea of the state as having a monopoly on violence and power, in a certain way. sense, it also re-elaborates the issue of domination and power, central to Max Weber.
Lévinas, E., Humanisme de l’Autre Homme, (1973) (Montpellier : Fata Morgana, 1972).
New tensions and pandemic
06
Feb
In addition to the war between Russia and Ukraine, where tensions are growing, tensions
between the United States and China have increased due to an alleged spy balloon that entered the American sky and a new tension between Azerbaijan and Armenia where there are 130 thousand Armenians isolated in substandard conditions. -human activities in the region of Nagorno-Kabarakh, claimed by both countries (map) and with a history of conflicts.
In the war after the delivery of German tanks to Ukraine and American aid, Russia reacted with fury promising a devastating offensive, February 24th will complete a year of war and a strong Russian offensive is expected by then, in addition there are threats to the West and an offensive in Moldavia, which borders Ukraine in the south, and thus create a new combat front.
The balloon that invaded American territory, coming from Canada and according to China was lost, since it will be taken over by the Americans (the overthrow could be dangerous), entered the Montana region, northern USA and with possible nuclear weapons, which led to suspicious, but China claims that the American measure was hasty and that it is just an atmospheric balloon, but tension has risen.
Beijing’s leaders declared that they “would not accept any conjecture or unfounded exaggeration” and accused “some US politicians and media” of using the incident “as a pretext to attack and defame China”, despite the tension the climate is not one of a war and the Taiwan question is a backdrop.
Covid-19 follows a roadmap of uncertainties, now there are indications that Japan is facing a growth of the pandemic, isolated during the previous stages, the country has opened up to tourism and this seems to be one of the indications of this unexpected growth, the use of masks there, for example, it predates the Pandemic.
According to the BBC website, the country reached a historic record on January 20 with 425 deaths in a single day, proportionally higher than Latin America, the United States and South Korea, among others, data is from Our World in Data, which is compiled by the University of Oxford.
There are also fears about side effects of Pfizer’s bivalent vaccine (immunizes the initial variant and new strains), according to the American health control body, the FDA, the analysis carried out on millions of elderly people did not identify a risk of stroke, but experts ask more in-depth study.
Being, consciousness and clearing
03
Feb
The clearing of Being was an important theme in Heidegger’s ontological resumption, it
is inseparable from the phenomenological methodology which his teacher Husserl was the main modern developer, but it remains an aporia, as stated in Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectics of Enlightenment, if there is in fact a self-destruction of enlightenment in modernity and why this happened.
Therefore, it is not simply a matter of resuming the Being, but as this can happen from the phenomenological method, then two questions must be raised: placing our preconceptions in parentheses as a result of enlightenment, which is called by Husserl the epoché phenomenological, and the question of the intentionality of consciousness, in it the Being is unveiled, there reside most of our problems and dissatisfaction.
Contemporary culture (or what’s left of it, as Dalrymple says, we’ve already posted here) goes against the grain in this sense, what some authors call an excess of positivity, that logic described even as “mystery”, affirmation of desires and needs, summarizing life seen as utility only and not as essence or fullness.
In this way, we must make an “emptiness”, a silence in the soul so that we have the fullness of the being, remove the immediate desires and needs in order to be able to understand in fact the true needs and nourishment of the Being that lead to joy and fullness, the simple impulse leads to temporary compulsions and as such satisfy only the immediate need, what is proper to the Being remains hidden.
It is possible with these two measures: to make a void (epoché) by putting in parentheses what our preconceptions are, re-elaborating them in a hermeneutic circle that actually allows a new “concept”, after the fusion of horizons.
This is why ontology says that the Being remains hidden, it is beyond what is immediate and apparent, it should not be sought “Outside”, but “Inside”, true interiority is needed, without manipulations and barriers, many thinkers, mystics and spiritualities manage to this, and reach a fullness, even if temporary, will be food for a true asceticism.
For Christian philosophy and theology, it is not possible to reach true fullness without announcing and living its values, says the reading (Mt 5:14): “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. Nobody lights a lamp and puts it under a bowl, but on a lamp, where it shines for everyone in the house”, but this must be done with respect and fraternity and never with proselytism and judgments.
Being, Truth and Consciousness
02
Feb
It is not by chance that when we are faced with the greatest technical development of humanity,
the current development of Artificial Intelligence that threatens to invade the universe of all things (the IoT is just a detail of this), we are also faced with the question of what it is consciousness.
From the truth of classical antiquity, Alethéia (a-létheia) is to reveal what is hidden, passing through countless authors until arriving at the Frankfurt School where Adorno and Horkheimer who speaks of the aporia of enlightenment, the one who at the beginning of modernity seeks to obtain a “objective” truth that conceals being.
In this question of truth, Heidegger, who develops the question of the forgetfulness of Being and the concealment of truth, developed it as: “in the following sentence where one writes about ‘truth’, it is evident that the representation of the essence of truth dictated by some modern manual of epistemology, leaving unchanged and untouched the essence of aletheia” (Heidegger, 1998, p. 115), says the author about authors who are trapped only in the etymology of the word.
The Frankfurtians, on the other hand, describe the issue of enlightenment as follows: “The aporia we face in our work thus reveals itself as the first object to be investigated: the self-destruction of enlightenment. We have no doubt – and this is where our petitio principii lies – that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightening thought” (Adorno & Horkeimer, 1947) which they reduce to a small principle, since they do not see the question of Being as central.
When questioning what is consciousness, or what is sentience in the matter of Artificial Intelligence, we are not questioning anything other than what separates us from things, ultimately what is Being and if in fact it only has meaning of “object” that modern enlightenment wanted to give us.
We are also faced with ethical and moral principles when “unveiling” (a-lethéia, non-hidden) the question of Being, resuming it is not just an exercise in the etymology of the word truth or a philosophical exercise, it is first of all to do an essential question, a lato principii: “what is being” and what is hidden.
The possibility of the clearing is none other than the one that puts us not before the truth logically development, for onto-logically, and from there to define what is conscience, developed by Heidegger in the following way: “consciousness is the appeal of the preoccupation from the estrangement of being in the world that awakens Dasein to its own power to be guilty” (Heidegger, 2012, p. 791).
The question remains if it is possible for all beings, and for the current modern man, a “awareness” that reveals within itself as an enlightenment of consciousness, beyond hatred, polarization, intolerance and the narratives that hide the truth of Being.
Turning to fortune tellers, self-help, does not make the wheel of history and truth go backwards, we walk in the dark, in concealment and not in the awareness of Being.
ADORNO, T. W. T. W. & Horkheimer, M. Dialética do Esclarecimento, 1947.
HEIDEGGER, Martin. Heráclito. Trad. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 1998.
______, Ser e Tempo (edição em alemão e português). Trad. de Fausto Castilho. Campinas: Unicamp; Petrópolis: Rio de Janeiro, 2012.
The idealist crisis and the ontological recovery
01
Feb
The evolution of the Enlightenment in both politics and economics culminated in Hegelianism,
after passing through Kant’s critique of reason, it is the last great theory that seeks to realize an “integrated” totality, subject to “dialectical” contradictions (it is different from the dialectic of classical antiquity) and, according to his model, the ultimate aim would be to reach the full spiritual essence, which has little or nothing to do with religiosity.
It was thus the dialectical materialist asceticism that ended in an enormous void and in the “forgetfulness of being”, a term used by Heidegger to contradict the theories that since Descartes have emptied and criticized the metaphysical reading of reality, in the etymology of the word meta-physis, in this case the Greek, since its origin is from there, according to Aristotle it was the first science, it gave solid knowledge about things, and the study is confused with ontology, the “being as being”.
For Kant this study is confused with that of customs, it is a non-empirical or rational knowledge, his study on morality and “subjectivity” will start from this relationship with cultural customs and here there is already a strong dose of relativism, and deepens the dualism between Subject x Object, forgetting the “Being”.
So that which is subjective, theoretical or metaphysical is falling into disrepute and theories of objectivity, practicality and empirical realism grow, this will not be done without contradiction, but the very definition of idealist dialectic is this, the development of this concept from from yourself.
Plato defined dialectics as the art of thinking, questioning and organizing ideas (Greek eidos – image, we already posted something), so neither theory is out of the question (idealism is also a theory, by the way, not very practical) , neither metaphysics nor “being”.
The theo-ontology of the end of the measured age will establish the relations between the entity and the being, according to Thomas Aquinas he “is infinite. Therefore, if it becomes finite, it must be limited by something, which has the capacity to receive it, that is, by the essence”, present in his thesis “The entity and the essence”.
Amidst the crisis of idealist thought, see the previous post, a new current emerges from Franz-Brentano in the mid-nineteenth century, which resumes phenomenology and ontology working on the intentionality of human consciousness, which was a specific study in Thomas Aquinas, to try to describe, understand and interpret the phenomena as they appear to perception.
Brentano was Husserl’s teacher, who rereads Descartes and Kant, and elaborates phenomenology with a different meaning given by his teacher Brentano, seeks to separate what is empirical, so the phenomenon of the mental act is not something that appears instantly in the mind, but depends on the memory and elaborates from there the concepts of protension and retension, the discussion about what is consciousness today reaches the objects of Artificial Intelligence.
Heidegger was a student of Husserl, and from him one can consider both the linguistic turn (not all authors agree) and the ontological resumption.
