Posts Tagged ‘God’
What is love after all
07
Aug
In a polarized world and now on the verge of 
regional wars that can escalate, talking about love seems innocuous and has no reflection on reality, but there are good works produced by humanity.
Paul Ricoeur wrote and we have already posted about this a few times about Le socius e le prochain (The partner and the neighbor), separating interests from true love for others.
However, Hannah Arendt’s work, although not definitive regarding love, the advisor Karl Jaspers himself expressed this about his doctorate “Love in Saint Augustine”, developed and appropriated some fundamental categories on the subject, of course we are not talking about erotic nor familial love.
According to author George McKenna, in a review of her thesis, Arendt tried to include a revision in her “The Human Condition”, but it is not very clear in Arendt’s book that, despite this, it has good development.
If this love can also be expressed in ancient Greek literature, such as agape love, which differs from eros and philia in this literature, from a Christian point of view the best development made is in fact that of Saint Augustine.
First because he separated this concept from good x evil Manichaeism, a dualism still present in almost all Western philosophy due to idealism and puritanism, then because he was in fact raptured upon discovering divine love, he wrote: “Late I loved you, O beauty so ancient and so young! Too late I loved you! Behold, you lived within me and I was looking for you outside!” (Confessions of Saint Augustine).
Then man must love his neighbor as God’s creation: […] man loves the world as God’s creation; in the world the creature loves the world just as God loves it. This is the realization of a self-denial in which everyone, including yourself, simultaneously reclaims your God-given importance. This achievement is love for others (ARENDT, 1996, p. 93).
Man can love his neighbor as a creation by returning to his origin: “It is only where I can be certain of my own being that I can love my neighbor in his true being, which is in his createdness.” (ARENDT, 1996, p. 95)
In this type of love, man loves the divine essence that exists in himself, in others, in the world, man “loves God in them” (ARENDT, 1996, 9
The biblical reading also summarizes the law and the Christian prophets like this (Mt 22, 38-40): “This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is similar to this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’. All the Law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
Love contains all the virtues: it does not become conceited or angry, it knows how to see where the true signs of happiness, balance and hope are found, even in a troubled world.
ARENDT, Hannah. Love and Saint Augustine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
The heart and beliefs
02
Aug
The heart is a vital organ, it irrigates blood
throughout the organism reaching all the cells of the human body, when we talk about beliefs (they are also hidden in objects of human knowledge, we believe that something is a certain “way”) we do not we just talk about faith.
Byung-Chul Han, when carrying out his analysis based on the classic authors of Western philosophy, approaches a perspective of what he will call “affective tone”, focusing mainly on Heidegger.
His book, unlike others that are just essays, has “Heidegger’s heart: on the concept of affective tonality in Martin Heidegger” (Ed. Vozes, 2023), his first book in my opinion, with a new, human and spiritual analysis. even spiritual at the core of Western philosophy.
Part of a concept dear to Judeo-Christian civilization, which is that of circumcision, but circumcision of the heart and not of the failed organ (the skin attached to the beginning of the penis), it is necessary to remember that although it is a male organ, it is an emblem of power, of authority and desire, was culturally a warlike culture.
The part of his vision with his eastern vision and that has a spiritual sense for his entire philosophical question, Han will develop that it is the circumcision of the heart, that which modulates and governs affection, circumcision has a different meaning than what is commonly spoken, the controversy between Christians and Jews at the beginning of the Christian era, is the circumcision of the heart.
Circumcision is the act of removing the skin of the male sexual organ, but even in the biblical sense it was the skin of the heart, in Deuteronomy it reads: “Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and no longer stiffen your neck” (Dt 10,6), citing in the epigraph of the first chapter of the book: “Circumcision of the heart” (Han, 2023, p. 7).
Thus, “this circumcision frees the heart from subjective interiority” (Han, 2023, p. 11), and there is a surprising preliminary conclusion in Heidegger: “Heidegger’s heart, on the other hand [confronts with Derrida], listens to one voice , follows the tonality and gravity of the “one, the only one that unifies” (Han, 2023, p. 14-15), for him it is an “ear of his heart” and thus there is something strong spiritual in this.
It is there that the human being finds his essence: “he remains in tune with that from which his essence is determined. In the tuning determination, man is affected and called by a voice that sounds all the purer the more silently it resonates through the sonant” (Han, 2023, p. 15) literally quoting Heidegger.
He will not say that it is faith, and it reveals the Buddhist influence of his thought, the author’s only link, in my opinion, with idealism, because in Buddhism there is only a personal elevation, there is no Person on the other side, who resonates through the resounding, that voice of the Holy Spirit.
The author clarifies the disagreement between Derridá and |Heidegger: “The ‘polyphony’ that Derrida opposes to totality does not exclude tonality” (pg. 16) we would say if these authors: Han, Derrida and Heidegger were Christians, that Heidegger and Han would be monotheists and Derrida would be polytheist, but it is clear that this “resounding voice” is not that of God, but from within.
Han, B.C. (2023) Heidegger’s Heart: on the concept of affective tone in Martin Heidegger. Trans. Rafael Rodrigues Garcia, Milton Camargo Mota. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes.
Build a life and not exclude
30
Jul
Both Nietzsche in The Gay Science and Peter
Sloterdijk’s Post-God stated the death of God, in fact it is just an attempt to kill God, because if he does not exist we cannot kill him and if he exists he is immortal, so we can only just erase it from our mind temporarily as it will come back intuitively, the proof is that atheists do not ignore Him.
Nietzsche’s text is clear, but it was also distorted: “The mad man threw himself into their midst and pierced them with his gaze. ‘Where has God gone’, he shouted, ‘I will tell you now! We killed him – you and me. We are all your killers! But how did we do this? How do we manage to drink the sea entirely? Who gave us the sponge to erase the horizon? What did we do, untying the earth from its sun? Where are you moving now? Where do we move? Away from all the suns?” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, § 125)
Thus, not being able to kill him, they destroy his “symbolic” values, such as the Holy Supper in the Olympics, for example, or distorting the true history of the God-man: Jesus, as did the idealist theology of Ludwig Feuerbach that we recently posted, created an “absolute” empty and abstract, which cannot be God as a trinitarian person.
However, the reaction to the Hegelian Theocide, that of Feuerbach, in which God only exists in the mind and thus is something of ideal thought and only with idealistic “transcendence” do we reach him, there is the religious reaction of closing oneself in the “community of the elect” , of God’s favorites, those chosen by criteria that a certain community determines and the rest are lepers, public sinners and unworthy of the “kingdom”, bad seed.
The parable of the tares and the wheat is clear, both are born in the same environment, but one does not bear fruit, will not participate in the wheat harvest and will be separated like chaff.
In a way, the reaction to this elevated God, distant from men, “all powerful” is nothing more than a vision of power that is also mundane and temporary and a form of despiritualized asceticism, the life of “exercises” as advocated by Peter Sloterdijk.
Spiritual truth is one in which everyone is included, there is unity and respect for all and no one is seen as a leper or bad seed, this is a Pharisaic interpretation, but it is clear that good seed bears good fruit so one can look at reality in its own way. back, but without prejudiced or exclusionary judgment.
Founded on perfectionism and extreme moralism, morality is important and should not be denied, however, taken to the extreme it makes “addiction” much closer and more likely to fall into it, that is, they are in fact false moralists because they are unable to put into practice what they defend, and it is these false exercises that lead to a practice of deviations and moral aberrations.
The union of these concepts with true humanism, one whose inspiration is divine, cannot and should not lead to attitudes of exclusion, isolation and lack of charity.
Everything has to be thought of in a balanced way, from politics to religiosity, from family to social life, from social action to contemplation.
Spirit and power
25
Jul
Power and autorithy seem to get confused, but this is not true
as authoritarian governments are growing in the world and this has always been a bad symptom of civilization because it indicates both disputes and, at their limit, wars.
Byung-Chul Han in his book “In the Swarm” explains after saying about the necessary distance in the public sphere, that the “waves of indignation indicate, moreover, a weak connection with the community” (Han, In the Swarm, 20,18, pg. 22) and he has a specific book about power.
The book What is Power? (2019) has a long analysis of the issue in Hegel, this is justified both by the influence on Western thought and by the incidence of the vision of power that affects the entire public sphere, but we highlight his vague concept of the Absolute and the influence even religious , seen in the previous post.
Its analysis is important when it refers to ontological concepts, thus defining that “the entity is, even when it is finite, surrounded by the other” (Han, 2019, p. 110) and the Being must generate a negativity in itself, this is not the case here of “bad thoughts” but the concept that cites in Paul Tillich (1886-1965) that the power of being as “the capacity of living beings to overcome negativity, or as he says, “non-being”, that is, the who does not involve it in self-affirmation” (pg. 111).
Quoting him, Han states: “one has more power to be, because it must have been overcome but not to be, and as long as one can overcome it. When you can no longer bear it or overcome it, then it is total impotence, the end of the power of being, the event. This is the risk of every living being” (Han, 2019, p. 111).
He cites Foucault’s thesis that the human being would be “the result of submission” (pg. 118) and Hegel who thinks that power should act primarily in a “non-repressive way” (pg. 119) however, both do not abandon the idea from the Absolute, which actually comes from Machiavelli’s Prince and Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, and as the author says: “power promises freedom” (pg. 121).
The need to create a “neurotic” religion of power, for Hegel, would come from the idea of God, the power that He has the power to “be himself”, this comes from idealism that does not overcome the division between subject and object, or be the Creator and the created (beings and entities) are not composed.
There is no doubt that power, without the necessary negativity of non-being (the inclusion of the Other) is a neurosis as Hegel says, and thus its “god” or “the spirit” “would still be an appearance of this neurosis” (Han, 2019 , p. 121).
“The pain of finitude can perfectly be the pain of any limit that separates me from the other, which can only be overcome by the creation of a particular continuity… it does not have the continuity of the self that power creates. She does not have the intention of returning to herself” (Han, 2019, p. 121).
Hegel’s neurotic power is not that of the Creator, it is of the being caged in the self, incapable of looking at and serving the Other, of leaving the self, of denying oneself to serve the Other, it is a neurotic power.
The idealistic religion
24
Jul
Among the Young Hegelians, those who along
with Marx criticized the “old Hegelians”, especially David Strauss and Bruno Bauer, was Ludwig Andres Feuerbach (1804-1821) much better known for Karl Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” than for his own work, but his concepts, although criticized by Marx, also influenced him in addition to the other “new Hegelians” also known as the “Hegelian left”.
Feuerbach, coming from a Catholic environment, was educated in Protestantism, from a young age he was oriented towards religion, beginning his studies at the University of Heidelberg, but upon meeting Friedrich Hegel, he abandoned theology and became a student of this philosopher for two years, which provoked profound changes in his thinking and creates what I call here “idealistic religion”, but the God of Christianity is no longer Feuerbach’s god.
Hegel’s idea of the absolute is well known, where his “in itself” which is his “one” is not alienated from matter to finally emerge as “Absolute Spirit”, but man, as a conscious species, is the infinite itself and absolute, being man’s reason for his “liberation” to the detriment of indoctrination or Christianization (Feuerbach, 2013, p. 2-23) this God that man “imagines” is for the young Hegelian now in fact his own being, its own essence, it is necessary to understand that Being for idealists is not ontological Being, but rather an “anthropological” being.
Thus, religiosity, in the idealist analysis, would not be linked to an immaterial being, which transcends the human (idealist transcendence is the knowledge of the object), it is not a timeless and creative Being, but nature itself, in another way Spinoza also explored this .
Thus Feuerbach understands that man’s relationship with his “god”, which is different from other “young Hegelians” (Marx will criticize him), his god or gods, is founded on his own ex-sistence, a subject also explored in ontology, but seen as a relationship with “time” or temporal being.
The idealistic god is the one that man externalizes “is nothing more than the divinized essence” (Feuerbach, 2009, p. 29), in a way even more so as “the history of religion is the history of man” (Feuerbach, 2009 , p. 30) and here lies the dividing line with Marx because he sees history as his “mode of production”, the relationship with work and the means of production to carry it out: feudalism, capitalism, etc. Thus Feuerbach understands that man’s relationship with the supersensible, which for him “exists”, that is, has its ex-sistence, is in fact an “aesthetic pathology”, an amalgamation of mystical feelings that are at the same time the foundation and promoter of religiosity. : “Mourning and pain at the death of a person or at the diminution of light and heat, joy at the birth of a person, at the return of light and heat after freezing winter days or at the harvest, terror at phenomena in themselves terrible or at the least in man’s imagination… (Feuerbach, 2009, p. 49). So the big mistake, even for “religious people”, is to separate substantiality from spirituality, which is, in our view, the essence of false contemporary asceticism.
Feuerbach, Ludwig. (2009) Preleções sobre a Essência da Religião. Trad. José da Silva Brandão. Petrópolis/RJ. Editora Vozes.
Feuerbach, Ludwig. (2013) A Essência do Cristianismo. Trad. José da Silva Brandão. Petrópolis/RJ. Editora Vozes.
The question of spirit in Hegel
10
Jul
Byung-Chul Han criticizes Hegel’s Phenomenology
of Spirit seen “in terms of the forgetfulness of being” (Heidegger’s central theme) as an “arid self” that finds “its limitation to the being that encounters it” (Han, 2023, p. 334), this is not the resistance of the spirit.
Hegel recovers in part, in the epigraph of the last chapter “truth is the whole”, re-discusses the dialectic and its metaphysics in idealism “in relation to “just being” which empties it to a name “that no longer names anything”, consciousness natural… when he realizes being, he assures that it is something abstract” (Han, 2023, p. 336).
This natural (idealistic) consciousness “lingers on “perversities” … “it tries to eliminate one perversity by organizing another, without remembering that the authentic inversion” [occurs when] “the truth of the essence is withdrawn into the being” (Han, 2023, p. 336, citing Heidegger).
In contrast to Hegel’s dialectic, this topic would fill a book, it engages in a dialogue with Derrida and Adorno on the question of mourning and the work of mourning, killing death is not just something secret in the heart of Plato or Hegel (pg. 384), but also reverse the negative of Being.
This work of “tragedy” is distinguished from the “work of mourning” of dialectics (Han, 2023, p. 385), it is what Han calls in other works excessive positivity, not understanding pain (in the palliative society, for example, analyzing the pandemic and the pain itself).
“Tears free the subject from his narcissistic interiority… they are the “spell that the subject casts on nature” (Han, 2023, p. 394), citing Adorno the “Aesthetic Theory” is the book of tears and that contrary to Kant, “the spirit perceives, in relation to nature, less its own superiority than its own naturalness” (Han, 2023, p. 395).
Hegel’s absolute is abstract: “the Absolute is absolute only to the extent that it knows itself as Absolute, that is, as self-consciousness” (Hegel in §565 of the Phenomenology of Spirit).
For true asceticism it is beyond human nature, it leads to an ascension, a new interiority that expresses itself in a more human exteriority, not human self-consciousness (even thought of in religion) but rather that which admits human singularity in the one divine and This is Absolute.
Han, B-C. (2023) O coração de Heidegger: o conceito de tonalidade afetiva em Martin Heidegger (Heidegger’s Heart: on the concept of affective tonality in Martin Heidegger). Trans. Rafael Rodrigues Garcia, Milton Camargo Mota. Brazil, RJ: Petrópolis, Vozes.
Interiority in a time of exteriorities
04
Jul
Modern man has not only projected himself
onto objects (what idealist philosophy calls subjectivity) but there is also an absence of inner asceticism, what projects and builds itself in his soul, are not just values, but a characteristic of being- there (dasein).
This extends more deeply into the disbelief that there is any interiority and then cultivating empathy, altruism, goodwill and sharing the common good is increasingly distant in the face of selfish, narcissistic values and the cultivation of only worldly exteriority.
The Neoplatonists, like Plotinus (205 – 270), believed in monism and in this radiation of light, there is a one or a god (it was not the Christian God) from which emanates a divine source that radiates throughout all creation, in this one light that Augustine of Hippo will rely on this philosophy to deny the Manichaean dualism which he had previously believed and from there he turned to Christianity.
Soul, or anima for the Greeks, is not just an interiority but also what moves it externally, so it is not disconnected from its actions in the world, the distance between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, was described by many authors, in antiquity Gregory of Nazianzen (329-369), a Christian mystic who is cited by Byung-Chul Han in the Society of Fatigue, and developed more fully in his more recent book Vitta Comtemplativa.
The Jewish festival of the Sabbath (or Shabbat) (photo) is described in Byung-Chul Han’s book as the phatos of the action, which he begins in his book by describing this festival that contemplates God and the Sabbath, for Jewish culture redemption, the immortal (page 107), yesterday time is suspended, that is, the moment of pause in human action for divine action, thus complementing the action.
Exteriority and interiority are related, civilization’s malaise is due to the culture and time we live in, but also interiorities without true asceticism.
In the Bible, when a paralytic (someone with difficulty in acting) approaches Jesus before healing him, he states that his sins are forgiven (Mt 9:5), he gives him full interiority, the Sabbath.
Han, Byung-Chul. (2023) Vita Contemplativa (Contemplative Life). Trans. Lucas Machado, Brazil, RJ: Petropolis.
Courage and Being
02
Jul
The imprudent is not courageous, in ancient times
Plato and Aristotle defined it in a similar way, for Plato courage “knows what not to fear” while for Aristotle it is the moral virtue that lies in the middle ground between cowardice and recklessness.
However, when courage becomes cowardice, it is certainly not when one is prudent and knows the dangers that surround a certain attitude, but if it is a virtue it cannot be far from the truth, so it means that it cannot renounce the truth, under penalty of renouncing the your Being.
But truth is not a vision of data, facts or a position in the face of reality, philosophy and modern physics include a third hypothesis between Being and non-Being, and thus the Aristotelian “middle term” is possible without it being the capitulation of truth.
The theme of anguish and fear, which occurs when there is a threat to one’s existence, often leading people to remain in the dispersion of concern, in Heidegger, this dispersion, which is the way of existing for most people, can only be overcome through an “anticipatory decision” that leads Dasein to accept within it only what is finite, moral or immediate.
Other authors, such as Kierkegaard, who criticized those who had thought of a solution to this concern in a God “imagined” by reason, and in this sense he is correct since it is not deposited in faith, criticize those who had thought of a transcendence of the “God above of God”, which would be a kind of courage of the Being, and this would be the power of being with roots in transcendence, they are right because, not being something divine, “trust in God” transforms into a power located beyond, and thus becomes the confidence in yourself.
There is something in human existence that is a kind of ultimate fear: death, there are those who seek the source of eternal youth, the prolongation of life, but human finitude is something that causes a fatal fear, and in the face of death, very few are those that do not invoke the divine presence, the presence of the mother or some other divine resource.
The Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han clarifies this well: “The modern loss of faith, which concerns not only God and the hereafter, but reality itself, makes human life radically transitory” because living well in each present moment is be in eternity.
Not everyone believes because they need to see the eternal, but Thomas, who lived with Jesus, needed to touch him when he was resurrected to believe that there is the eternal, there is the infinite beyond the human, the Being-there that we are.
What is the universe made of and what is its origin?
30
May
Greek philosophers from the 6th century BC
believed that the four elements of all nature were: fire, earth, water and air, Pythagoras proposed a practically religious school that everything was numbers while Democritus proposed the atom and that they would have rounded, smooth, irregular shapes and smooth, being able to form an infinity of elements, but until the end of the Middle Ages it was believed that fire was composed of one of these particles: the firegist, we owe the chemical table to Dimitri Mendelev who in 1869 organized his chemical elements, previously the alchemist Henning Brad discovered that phosphorus heated with urine residue caused flames and Antoine Lavoisier in 1789 organized some elements into simple, metallic, non-metallic and non-metallic.
Current standard physics has established 7 elements: neutrinos, electron, quarks, photon, graviton, gluon and weak force boson, but there is a more mysterious quantum world that of superstrings, it seems frightening or using the physicists’ word ghostly (Einstein used it the first time realizing that there is a third state in quantum physics in which the element is neither nor is it, later called the Included Third).
The most convincing theory of the universe until recently was that of the Big Bang and an expanding universe, entropy, Stephen Hawking was its great theorist, although this theory already existed before, and thus proposed an “arrow of time” in his most important book. famous “A brief history of time” (1988), but James Webb’s discoveries called into question when he found galaxies and celestial bodies at the edge of the universe that shouldn’t be there, now even the arrow of time is questioned.
The important thing when looking at the universe is to understand where everything came from and whether this whole thing and intelligent life, which for now we only find on our planet Earth, had a beginning and more importantly, had an intention.
The biblical “fiat lux” seems to agree so much with the Big Bang theory, before atoms there were waves or “strings” created in the first 10−44 seconds (Planck time) and then subatomic elements were created, in the case of strings, everything It is initially formed by one-dimensional strings that would be divided into “open” strings (linear) and “closed” strings (in loop strength), vibrating at different frequencies that would give rise not only to the 7 elements, but also the molecules that initiate life.
Be that as it may, there was an initial moment, and the form of this “being” must have been preceded by a creative “being”, the paleontologist and Christian theologian Teilhard Chardin proposed that the entire universe would be the body of this supreme “Being” of the “being”, thus he should have a divine and a material (human) reality, thus he proposed that the universe is Christocentric.
It is not possible for the All to have emerged from nothing, and if there is an original form of the All, of some “element” the physical world is composed, thus there is a “Corpus” of this All, with the difference that He is the creator and all the rest created, but created with some substrate of its own Supreme Being, of course the theory for this is more elaborate, but its understanding is simple, we are part of a body, of a group that communicates, the idea of the individuation of the universe is not plausible, because at the beginning we were one thing: a small cosmic corpuscle, a set of vibrating strings (we could even think of a choir making a song), but there was a moment of creation. and Someone created it.
Ascension and non-presence
10
May
Reading this book by Byung-Chul Han, “Heidegger’s heart: on the concept
of affective tonality” is different from the author’s other “essays”, it reveals a first foray into the philosophical world, far from being a treatise, there are already connotations of an original thought.
In times so scarce of authentic thoughts, we are under the crossfire of the new and old Hegelian idealism, and the author demonstrates this not through historical critical analysis, but through what goes deeper into thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Derridá and his master P .
I would say that the apex, according to my reading bias, is in Lévinas’ analysis, when quoting him on page 68: “The ‘imaginary destruction of all things’, Lévinas’ Epoché, is not followed by a total absence of being ” … “against all formal logical imperatives” (pg. 68), which is reminiscent of Barsarab Nicolescu’s third inclusion, in allusion to quantum physics, is a new logical threshold.
And he continues “There is no longer this or that; there is no such thing as anything. But universal absence is, in turn, a presence, an absolutely inevitable presence” (pg. 69 quoting Lévinas again: “The existence of existence”).
Lévinas even suggests the real experience of this “Il y a” (beeing* in French, his native language), this nothing does not indicate a noun and as such is a “not something” (reminiscent of Han’s non-things), this “ghostly” presence (Einstein called the included third of quantum physics this), “being remains as a field of force… returning to the heart of it from the negation that removes it, and to all degrees of this negation” (again quoting Lévinas, pg. 70).
The suggestive potential of “Il y a” is elevated by logical dissonance: “Obscurity – as the presence of absence – is not a purely present content. It is not about a ‘something’ that remains, but about the very atmosphere of presence, which can certainly appear much later with a content…” (pg. 70, also citing the work of Lévinas).
The ascension of Jesus (photo picture of tiles, Portugal), a global festival this week in many Christian countries is even a holiday, in the light of this ontological vision it can reveal a theological reformulation, because in the biblical reading his departure and absence corresponds to the coming of a third person of the Trinity: the Holy Spirit.
Thus in John 16:13 we read: “However, when the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak for himself, but he will say everything he hears and will reveal to you everything that is to come”, and in this way he will reveal the truth.
This onto-theo-teleo-logical truth must include a trinitarian logic: the Included Third.
* being in general (ontologic)
Han, B. C. (2023) Coração de Heidegger: sobre o conceito de tonalidade afetiva em Martin Heidegger (Heidegger’s heart: on the concept of affective tonality in Martin Heidegger). Transl.Rafael Rodrigues Garcia, Milton Camargo Mota. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes.
