Posts Tagged ‘ONTOLOGIE’
The truth among men
19
Nov
Gadamer establishes the need for co-reference for the construction 
of truth among men, the philosopher Socrates also said that the truth is not with men, but among men, so every self-referential discourse, even that appropriated by a group no longer has a truth growing and becomes just rhetoric.
Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995) developed the aspect of human finitude, as that which gives a provisional totality, in his book Totalidade e Infinito where he discusses the theme of alterity, with a central issue that is not being able to objectify the Other , and it is not about subjectivity, but the possibility of thinking of the Other in its absolute Otherness, in other words, as a totally other.
His book cannot be understood without an analysis focused on Husserl and Heidegger because of its phenomenological option in which it is affiliated, thus developing in this first chapter the category of alternation, while the second will deal with interiority, there appear notions of categories such as: jouissance , economy, home, ownership, work and the feminine is a topic that is so current in the question of gender and reflects the relationship of the Self with the real, enabling the building of a being at the same time separate and open to the outside.
Thus, the third chapter relates to the exteriority that underlies an ethics proposed by Lévinas, how an opening is given or built in Being, through the analysis of the categories of Infinity, Face and Exteriority, they are fundamental for the understanding of the Levinasian universe. .
The problem of human finitude in the aspect of truth can refer to a transcendence different from the idealist proposal, where the imperative category is linked to the concept of subjectivity: “acts in such a way that it is a model for others”, thus it is possible to develop in a personal universe an ethics, while for Lévinas, as it is for Gadamer and it was for Socrates, truth can only exist in a process of dialog with the Other and with the outside, every closure is self-referential.
Thus the “Other remains infinitely transcendent, infinitely strange, but his face, where his epiphany takes place and which appeals to me, breaks with the world that may be common to us and whose potentialities are inscribed in our nature and which we also develop in our existence” (Lévinas, 2008), here an epiphany that is only human.
We approach the Christmas feasts, in the Christian liturgy it is the feast of the divine epiphany, the divine manifestation to the peoples, for many only the feast of the wise men or the baptism of Jesus, but for those who think that the truth is “among men”, the presence of God with Us (Emmanuel) happens from the birth of the God-child.
In the biblical text (Jn 18: 37), when asked by Pilate if Jesus was the king of the Jews, he replied: “You say: I am king. I was born and came into the world for this: to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice”, thus this truth among men is also established for Christian culture as the incarnate word.
Truth and finities´s humans
18
Nov
Not only did Hans Georg Gadamer write about the truth regarding
Human finitude, Emmanuel Lévinas also developed the theme.
In Gadamer, the conclusion about the truth of human experience is the awareness of its finitude, that is, it is knowing your own limits, knowing that you are not lord of time and the future, nowadays that you are not lord of nature and its behavior , the great Enlightenment ideal, and so it has its limits and its plans are insecure.
Thus, in Gadamer, the issue of rhetoric and discourse is not exactly an issue and the question is not really called into question, to be able to question it is necessary to really want to know the truth and it may be outside the limits of the questioner, says in your text:
“To ask, you have to want to know, that is, to know that you don’t know. And in the exchange of questions and answers, of knowing and not knowing, described by Plato as a comedy, one ends up recognizing that for all knowledge and discourse in which one wants to know the content of things, the question takes precedence. A conversation that wants to explain something needs to break these things through with a question” (GADAMER, 2008, p. 474).
Thus, it will be inscribed beyond prejudice, and in the constitution of new horizons, thus understanding the text or a fragment of the past, for Gadamer is to understand it from the issue that should be seen as a process of continuous fusion or broadening of horizons through which the interpreter participates with others in the long and arduous path of meaning, he goes beyond the romantic and historical Enlightenment point of view, which is unacceptable: the symbolic and plural language, characteristic of the narrativity of things.
But what does this mean? what this means for the philosophical hermeneutics that recognizes human finitude, there is no immediate possibility of a coincidence with the real, as every human understanding is linguistically mediated as every language is, in the Aristotelian view, a hermenia (interpreter) originating from the real and this it can be extended to cultures, to peoples, and especially to native peoples, primary sources of discourse and their own language.
As man is finite, only in language can his fundamental dialogical power reach what Western philosophy calls objectivity (proper ideality), but it must go beyond the point of view of the anonymous transcendental subject (idealist subjectivity) to reach the dimension of co. -reference of concrete men, of others.
Concreteness is thus the word that decenters and challenges, places what is said in otherness, and its perspective of tracing a fusion of new horizons does not end.
GADAMER, H.G. Truth and Method I. Fundamental features of a philosophical hermeneutics. 10th ed. Petrópolis, Brazil: Vozes, 2008
Act, potency and agape
15
Oct
What Aristotle defined as potency was conditioned to the act, so
the act is a current manifestation, in the example of the figure beside the seed), while potency is what could be (virtually, while virtú) the seed in potency is a tree could its manifestation as being to produce fruits and new seeds, while virtual, in the sense of virtue, is to transform it into a table or even a house.
Actual potential actualization is not just the seed that becomes a tree and bears fruit, the main source of change must be completely real and not only correspond to natural potentiality, but that which completes the rest, and this depended on Aristotle’s The first motor that gave meaning to everything, and that Thomas and Aquinas claims to be God, enters the question of conscience.
Here comes Logos or Pathos, since consciousness is always a dictate of reason and will, so for Thomas Aquinas Ethos depends essentially on human will and consciousness, while Logos leads us to a more primordial reason for Being , Pathos moves towards disordered passions and drives, while Logos should lead us to agape and balance.
Potency is thus characteristic of Being and Pathos its distortion, power seen as Pathos is authoritarian and passionate, while power as Ethos is ethical and agapic, in the sense of service done out of gratuitous love to those they are subordinate, so it can until there is asymmetry, but it will only be diversity and never authority in the sense of absolute power as it is united with the Logos.
It is not by chance that Aristotle was tutor of Alexander the Great, and his form of power spread to the peoples, as well as Plutarch in his text “Alexandre (in Parallel Lives”, 1st century): “After this battle of Issus… Macedonians form to take a liking to the other, silver and women, and the way of life of the Asians, becoming so fond of it that, as if dogs, they set out on the trail in search and pursuit of the opulence of the Persians”, is likely. which also influenced the Romans.
That’s how we reach the second war and the dangers of post-modernity, will we leave our childhood civilization and will one day be able to coexist with peoples with different cultures and cosmogonies, we seem to be heading in the opposite direction: polarization.
It was also no different for Jews and Christians, in the nascent community many wanted to have “power” alongside Jesus, in the reading of Mark (Mk 10:36-37) the apostles James and John make a special request to Jesus: “He he asked, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ They replied, ‘Let us sit one on your right and one on your left, when you are in your glory,’ and the master tells them they don’t know what they’re asking for.
Ai asks if they can drink from the cup that He will drink (referring to their type of death), they keep saying yes, then rebuke them and tell the form of power that exists in civilization (Mark 10: 42-43): “Jesus called them and said: ‘You know that the heads of the nations oppress them and the great ones tyrannize them. But among you, it must not be like that: whoever wants to be great, be your service and whoever wants to be first, be the slave of all”.
So those who govern believers in the same way as the temporal power have not yet understood the potency of the agapic Logos.
The agnostic version of heaven’s bread
06
Aug
Ignoring poetic language is not just ignoring metaphor, analogies
do have a metaphysical limitation, but metaphor goes beyond analogy and there are assumptions in it that have yet to be verified by science as truth.
Paul Ricoeur clarifies: “what remains remarkable for us who come after the Kantian critique of this type of ontology is the way in which the thinker behaves in relation to the difficulties internal to his own solution…. of the categorical problem is resumed in its broad lines” (Ricoeur, 2005, p. 419).
This is not only linked to the idea of the analogy that was re-elaborated by Thomism, but the main source of all the difficulties “is due to the need to support the analogical predication by an ontology of participation” (p. 420), this analogy is in the level of names and predicates, thus “it is of the conceptual order” (p. 421).
The attack on metaphor and metaphysics reached modernity, he stated “Thought looks listening and listens while looking” (Heidegger apud Ricoeur, 2005, p. 436), and Jean Greisch says that this “leap” places language in “the ´there is´ es gibt [has], there is no possible transition” and this would be the deviation.
Ricoeur himself replies that what makes this enunciation as a metaphor is the harmony (einklang) between ist and Grund in the “nothing is without reason”, it is necessary to understand the metaphor-statement.
Remember the biblical passage about Pharisaism unable to understand the divine transcendence (Jn 6:42), “Is not this Jesus the son of Joseph? Don’t we know your father and mother? How then can you say that you came down from heaven?”, and that is why they cannot understand the bread of heaven, the divine food, because they are trapped in material food alone.
There is indeed a metaphor-statement that links material food to divine food, but harmony is not being tied to one by submitting it to another, as explained in the previous post, this was the great Thomist argument to overcome the Aristotelian analogy: science divine is to God, what human science is to the created” (Ricoeur, 2005, p. 423), quoting Aquino’s De Veritate.
Of course, the problem of metaphor and poetics is not limited to divine knowledge, but it does not prevent it.
Metaphor and Metaphysics
04
Aug
The peak and decline of Aristotle’s metaphysics, in Paul Ricoeur’s 
analysis, is “in the non-scientific characteristics of analogy, taken without its terminal meaning, regroup in his eyes in an argument against analogy” (Ricoeur, 2005, p. 414), and as the analogy was linked to the question of being, ontological questions are submerged with it.
However, Ricoeur clarifies, “it is because the ‘investigation’ of a non-generic connection of being remains a task for thought, even after the failure of Aristotle, that the problem of the ‘conducting thread’ will continue to be presented even in modern philosophy. ” (RICOEUR, 2005, p. 415).
For the author, while “the first gesture continues to be the conquest of a difference between transcendental analogy and poetic similarity” (Ricoeur, 2005, p. 416), which he explains and will not be extended here, the second “counter- example” of the “discontinuity of speculative discourse and poetic discourse” is much more serious, and it ranges from Kant’s discourse to Heidegger.
He explains that this was done in a mixed discourse that the doctrine of analogy entis reached in its full development and that was called ontotheology, due to the pretension of linking divine transcendence to Being, but ignoring the Thomistic discourse, which is “an inestimable testimony”.
What Aquinas does is “establish theological discourse at the level of a science and thus completely subtract it from the poetic forms of religious discourse, even at the price of a rupture between the science of God and biblical hermeneutics” (p. 417) .
However, the problem is more complex “than that of the regulated diversity of the categories of being of Aristotle”, “to speak rationally of the creator God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The bet is to be able to extend to the question of divine names the problematic of the analogy raised by the equivocal notion of being” (p. 417), remember here the battle between nominalists and medieval realists.
Explaining that the doctrine of the analogy of being was born “from this ambition to involve in a single doctrine the horizontal relation of categories to substance and the vertical relation of created things to the creator” (p. 419), now this was exactly the project of an ontotheology .
Thus, the Thomistic discourse “rediscovers a similar alternative: to invoke a discourse common to God and creatures would be to ruin divine transcendence, to assume a total incommunicability of the meanings from one plane to the other would be, in compensation, to condemn oneself to the most complete agnosticism” (p. 418), he takes up the categorical problem “in its broad lines” and “it is the very concept of analogy that must be constantly re-elaborated” (p. 420).
A question remains to be answered, wouldn’t this be a “return from metaphysics to poetry, through a dishonorable recourse to metaphor, according to the argument that Aristotle opposed to Platonism?” (p. 421).
The knowledge and doing
22
Jun
The society we live in is a performance society, as 
Byung Chul Han calls it, who did his doctorate at Heidegger, it is a society of doing, but not of knowing how to do.
Remembering “old theorists”, deifying ancient theories that had a determined temporal functioning, constitutes the setback and crisis of philosophy, not of thought, because man as a Being is capable of unveiling and discovering, because there is a forgetfulness of being.
Knowledge not closed in logic, with openness and possibility of new discoveries is the constitutive movement of time, there is not something fully understood and finished, it is constitutive of what happens in time, and it is subject to history, it is knowledge practical and of life, a Lebenswelt as Husserl called him.
Heidegger started from there with the direct influence of Husserl, the meaning of his Phenomenology supposes this opening for seeing things as they manifest themselves, the principle of knowledge.
Thus, there is not something understood, finished, what there is is a comprehensibility in a constant becoming, implying practical knowledge, a know-how that is more than the objective of science, it must be the foundation of every comprehensive act as one that seeks to know.
The essential opening is not for the hermeneutic consciousness as seen by Heidegger a primarily rational act, it is an affective disposition, one of the structural existences of the being-there, it is shown that understanding is always an affective understanding, in the sense of “affecting”.
Interpretation follows affection, but what is interpreting here if not revisions and elaborations of meaning, set in motion, thus interpretation is for Heidegger:
“The interpretation of something as something is essentially based on having-prior, seeing-prior and concept-prior. Interpretation is never an unassuming apprehension of something previously given […]” (HEIDEGGER, 2014, p. 427).
One of Heidegger’s central philosophical problems is the question about the possibilities of language, it is from this that the Being elaborates its worldview, from which it cannot escape, it enables us to understand the world, it elaborates the being-in -world.
Being in the world that would imply know-how depends on the worldview, impoverished and obscured by performance, the demand for efficiency and poor articulation with time.
HEIDEGGER, M. Ser e tempo (Being and time) Translation, organization, previous note, attachments and notes by Fausto Castilho. Campinas, SP: Publisher of Unicamp; Petrópolis, RJ: Editora Vozes, 2014.
