What does it mean to see
11
Apr
We explore blindness a lot in our posts: philosophical (in Plato’s Republic,
the myth of the cave), logical (Parmenides, Russell, Hilbert, etc.), religious (Feuerbach, Hegel, etc.) and literary (Saramago’s blindness essay and the Plague of Camus), just to name a few, besides them we navigated about the language in Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Levinas, Ricoeur and others.
Now we want to navigate through the world of vision, said Bachelard: “all beings are pure because they are beautiful”, while the poet Alberto Caeiro “the world was not made for us to think about it, but for us to look and agree, also the Russian philosopher and mystic Nicolas Berdjaev (there are many Russian mystics) used to say that in Paradise there is no ethics and there is only aesthetics, all this to say that seeing is having eyes for beauty, which is why many things today that are ugly are self-proclaimed beautiful, so the inversion is not just ethical .
The ugly was for Plato, from the ontological point of view, the almost-nothing, the sensible world being what is apparently real, being mere shadows of ideas (the myth of the cave) and the ideal (eidos) the truly real, thus the ugly it is formless and has no real existence and is not a universal model.
It is not unnatural that in a fragmented world, on the brink of its polycrisis, beauty almost disappears, and so man does not see it, what he sees are shadows, drafts of diffuse and confused ideas, the universal model disappears and discourse is merely discourse. of the conflict.
We like the point, straight and flat, but this is Euclid’s Geometry, the world is not straight and flat.
The beautiful emerges in harmony, suggests fusion where there is division, confuses the chaotic by giving it form and even the world of pure form is no longer geometric it is fractal, not fractional, but a natural fraction belonging to the whole of the less significant part of the whole body (in the photo the Lorentz fractal and the butterfly effect).
From the logical point of view it is the approximation of chaos theory (there is chaotic logic), from the philosophical point of view it is the view of complexity (the simple is almost always simplistic), from the religious point of view one can say: “God created everything and saw that it was good” (and beautiful), from a literary point of view I think the best expression was Friedrich Schiller (1756-1805): “How are we going to rebuild the unity of human nature, which seems completely suppressed by this original opposition and radical?”(page 71), wrote in his work “Educação Estética do Homem”, about the division inside man between the formal impulse that drags him in the dimension of his time.
Seen as a poet it is a wonderful work, as a philosophy it is subject to criticism due to the historical distance of its time and the walls of the German ideology of its time.
SCHILLER, F. (1989) “Educação Estética do Homem numa série de cartas”, trad. Roberto Schwartz e Márcio Suzuki, Brazil, São Paulo: Editora Iluminuras.
Leaked documents and rhetoric of tension
10
Apr
A leaked document that would contain alleged US secret information about
the war between Ukraine and Russia may contain part of the information true and some false, according to US military sources, the assessment of the death toll in the war in Ukraine would be false.
Newspapers like The New York Times, on the other hand, assess that it is an effort by Moscow to provoke more disinformation than news already known as the anticipated deliveries of weapons, as well as the formation of troops and battalions according to war strategies, however this already shows that there are some gaps in US intelligence in the effort to support Ukraine.
Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said, “We are aware of the reports of social media posts, and the department is looking into the matter.”
The US Department of Justice opened investigations into these disclosures, which also included information from important allies such as Israel, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates.
American rhetoric and Western leaders continue to assert that Russia has committed war crimes, including the “deportation” of Ukrainian children to Russia, condemned by the Hague court, while Russian rhetoric continues to be one of insecurity at its borders.
What the documents reveal, although without precise data, is a probable Ukrainian offensive next month, Finland’s official entry into NATO creates another frontier of conflict and some Russian response is also expected there.
In terms of peace, the Brazilian proposal to cede Crimea, which was already Russian territory before the war, in exchange for the resumption of territories occupied in the current war, was not accepted by Ukraine.
So both Russia and Ukraine seem to be taking the war to the limits of attrition, the death of countless soldiers and the economic consequences that have begun to appear in the world economy.
China has hit back at rhetoric that it is not making enough effort for peace, saying the “West are not in a position to dictate what we should do”, Chinese Ambassador to Russia Zhang Hanhui told Izvestia.
The hope that negotiations can move forward from countries outside the conflict remains.
Civilizing passion: crisis and clearing
07
Apr
It is not the first civilizational crisis that humanity is going through today, if 
it has roots in the thought that developed a form of national and chauvinist polis, empires are the multinational expression of this way of looking at nations, this however has an aggravating factor: the possibility use of nuclear and biological weapons of mass extinction.
Because a passion comparing it with the passion of Jesus, we have already outlined the issue of innocence and the tragic and legal aspects that it involves throughout last week, Brazil experienced this week a drama in the city of Blumenau the death of innocent children, the world aspect is the one that from ideological conceptions and visions of the world promotes a limitless crisis, this is the passionate side (in the photo Bucha´s tragedy, Ukraine).
The entry that we announced at the beginning of the week, of Finland in NATO creates a large border area of NATO with Russia allowing a land war in an area where it is sensitive and there are remnants of recent historical intolerance, the so-called “winter war” from 1939.
If Russia takes what it calls a “countermeasure” and it could be in the military field, since in the economic and trade field there is nothing that could be more serious than the current situation between nations, military retaliation triggers a dangerous trigger. that will have a response from NATO.
A clearing is possible, the one that Heidegger claimed in the midst of these hostilities, the clarity that there will be no unilateral victories, the war with Ukraine itself does not seem to have a possible end this year, unless there is a round of peace negotiations.
China would take an offensive position in its resumption of the island of Taiwan, which it considers part of its territory, Iran is increasingly closer to Russia and a good part of Latin America currently has governments that are more to the left, in short, this complicated world scenario may be the reason to open a clearing in the middle of the forest of hatred and hostility that opens up at every step of the war.
It will be a great passion of humanity, like all suffering, this one on an unimaginable scale after a trauma and then a reflection when seeing the enormous losses that the situation involves, it will undoubtedly be in a possible tragic situation never seen before, a new “clearing” of civilizing consciousness .
Peace is always possible, it is always possible to avoid the loss of innocent lives if there is prevention.
Thought from on High and Communion
06
Apr
What kind of knowledge is this that encompasses knowledge “from above”,
beyond the human, but without contradicting it, Morin’s response and others such as Martin Buber, Emannuel Lévinas and Paul Ricoeur seem to lead to the same point, to go towards the Other without reservation.
Two mystical falsifications are possible in this direction, one that denies conscience and respect for the Other, those who appeal to a false Christian religiosity, the Bible is clear: “If anyone declares: “I love God!”, but hates his brother, he is a liar” (1 John, 4:20-21), but there are those who cry out for the extreme opposite of the materiality of faith, to these the biblical answer is also clear: “Man shall not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4 ,4), curiously opposes and does not dialogue.
Curious because the vision of the last supper of Jesus with his disciples, his great memorial and his eternal presence in his materiality (flesh and blood), is the cause of much controversy and divergence, both true that he broke the bread, and true who declared his divinity.
Thinking things from above cannot fail to have its concreteness, its materiality, you see that bread is not wheat, but wheat transformed by human hands into bread, just like wine.
It does not fail to have the most sacred and divine aspect when asking the disciples to do this in his memory and in his name, thus it is renewed and divinized by the human hands that repeat it.
How to understand communion without the presence of the Other, without dialogic with the opposite, without this paradox of understanding that even with opposition, new horizons are possible, as advocated by the hermeneutic circle, which asks that preconceptions be left “in parentheses” before .
We have a vision of truth, logic and rationality, but true communion is only possible with a step further, the belief that something divine also belongs to the Other, to the different and the opposite of my worldview, there is no communion without this , there is only tolerance.
I have always asked myself why wars, hunger, misery, injustice among men, my answer today is that there is no true communion among men, perhaps some small tolerance, some respect that hides true interests, perhaps a respect that is even human but not divine.
The polycrisis and thinking aloud
05
Apr
When we think only of everyday things, they are important and even fundamental, we often fail to perceive what is deeper involved in them, the thought and culture in which we are immersed and which are rapidly pointing to a polycrisis.
The word coined by Morin was taken up again in an interview with Le Monde, where he emphasized: “The health crisis triggered a chain of crises that were linked together. This polycrisis or megacrisis extends from the existential to the political, passing through the economy, from the individual to the planetary, passing through families, regions, States. In short, a tiny virus in an overlooked village in China has unleashed the disruption of a world” (Le Monde, April 20, 2020).
In his book VI of Method: Ethics, he explains: “Our civilization separates more than it connects. We are in a deficit of reconnection and this has become a vital necessity”, so it is impossible not to think about things from above: empathy, civility, cordiality and other values that little by little were being lost and brutalizing us as a civilization.
As a complex thinker, his thinking is antidisciplinary (in the sense of rigid specialties) and transdisciplinary (in the sense of recovering the whole lost in rigid boundaries of thought that define only one aspect of life).
Operators of complex thinking (the book Introduction to Complexity is fundamental) is, as the word itself says, intricate and comprehensive, but I highlight two essential points of its method, the dialogic and hologramatic aspect.
The dialogical considers the union of opposite and contradictory terms as complementary, for example life and death, this paradox is lived in the sacred sense in this Easter week, although it is not limited to the religious, it can and should be thought of in the existential and political.
The hologramatic points out that the apparent paradox of systems are component parts of a whole (in picture the universe formation), just as each part has prefigured an aspect of the whole, the most common example is that of the kaleidoscope, but that of the human body is also interesting, each part is alive by the functioning of the whole and helps the whole to function.
We behave like fans who are fanatical and disinterested in the whole for exercising too much a material, purely earthly and human culture that makes the whole, the high and the divine inconceivable in everyday life.
welcome to polycrisis
04
Apr
This is the part of title of the article by Adam Tooze, professor of history at Yale
University (USA) written in the Financial Times in 2022 that drew a lot of attention: pandemics, droughts, floods, mega storms, forest fires, war in Ukraine and high prices of fuel and food, as is typical of the magazine and of today’s world, the economic aspect stands out.
But Edgar Morin’s polycrisis went deeper, the author recognizes the origin of the term, but is unaware of what Edgar Morin and many other philosophers actually think, who point to the most fundamental root of these evils: our way of thinking. thinking and the vision of the world that we create from it and implant in our societies.
The term cited by Morin was said for the first time in 1990, but in an interview with Le Monde on April 20, 2020, the French educator updated the word: “The health crisis triggered a chain of crises that were linked together. This polycrisis or megacrisis extends from the existential to the political, passing through the economy, from the individual to the planetary, passing through families, regions, states. In short, a tiny virus in an overlooked village in China has unleashed a world of disruption.”
In his view, the polycrisis crossed our ways of being, living together, producing, consuming and being in the world, challenging us to think about all our paradigms, much of what he wrote talks about new methods such as hologramatic and the danger of hyperspecialization of science that leads “to a new obscurantism” that is our inability to see the whole in modernity.
It is true that we are going through other crises, but Tooze’s article shows the implications of the war in Ukraine and the pandemic in accelerating these crises (see the Map), in the pragmatic aspect of the economic it is clear, in the spiritual and ontological aspect it is still not so clear , but it may be clearer soon.
A dangerous threshold of war
03
Apr
With the shipment of weapons to Ukraine NATO has prolonged Ukraine’s war with
Russia in the tactical field for at least another year, this says Western and Russian analysts, but another front is threatened as Finland is about to join NATO only missing bureaucratic details.
It irritates Russia more than seeing its border countries join NATO, this was even the claiming limit for war with Ukraine and Finland has the longest border of NATO countries with Russia, more than 1,300 km, comparable to distance between Porto Alegre in Rio Grande do Sul and Queluz on the border of the State of São Paulo with Rio de Janeiro.
Finland erects a steel cable fence on the border (photo), and the countries have already lived through a war called the Winter War (it has this name because it started at the end of November 1939 and ended on March 12, 1940 with a treaty in which it lost part of its territory and a good part of its industrial capacity).
Although Finland has a small army, at the time even smaller and is now arming itself, it resisted heroically, but lost a significant part of its territory (see our post) and feels threatened by the current war in Eastern Europe.
There is another likely target of the war which would be Moldova, there is already a small separatist region called Transnistria, but in the geopolitical aspect it is Finland’s entry into NATO that most affects Russia and creates a strong pole of tension and now the new iron Curtain.
Sweden is bigger and has a larger population, practically more than twice that of Finland and it has also been arming itself and the process of joining NATO is slower, but the war could accelerate this process and military aid to Sweden would be inevitable.
An appeal by Belarus, an ally of Russia, for a peace agreement and the recent visit of Xi Jinping to Russia, which was expected to have a greater commitment to peace, remains unknown and it is possible that Putin has exposed his plans, and this includes Brazil for being part of the BRICS and having postponed the trip to China due to pneumonia from president Lula, but China is waiting for the visit.
An eventual war with Finland would open a delicate pole of the war, since it is practically a member of NATO and military retaliations could come into play in an explosive way.
The horizon of a possible peace is becoming more and more distant and the possibilities remote.
Belonging, inclusion and innocence
31
Mar
The question raised by Michael Sandel transcends the limits of law, life and ontology
itself, these are the arguments that justify the death of an innocent, violence and finally war, while the argument of a simple spectator who remembers that someone will die and can be a donor of organs freely and through a natural death.
Belonging can also be an argument for both the death of an innocent and the refusal of it, there are many cases in a war where, for some reason, someone who could kill an “enemy” in some unusual situation refuses to do so.
The aspect of the social contract where the state has a “monopoly” on violence, so it is fair to kill in defense of society, it is even fair to use cruelty (such as torture, for example) to obtain information and fight “evil” of the opposing group is also questionable.
The fact that we have not abandoned such methods and principles is the most serious testimony of the small advance that socially we still walk in the civilizing process, the fact that we are returning little by little to the serious periods of the Cold War indicates that we are still in a waiting period.
How many innocent people and civilians have little or nothing to support certain wars, like the Russian girl who made an innocent drawing about the war, shows that alongside the perversity of imperial struggles and colonizing processes, they are far from having been banished from civilization.
But what does the death of an innocent person mean, what is the ontological and theological meaning of this symbol, the lamb that Abram sacrificed in place of the son who would be sacrificed, let us remember that there are three great Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the that means
It is certainly far from the logic of law, far from rational logic, it means that only innocence and pacifism can contribute to a true civilizing process that dignifies man.
The Easter week that begins next Sunday, although it is a Christian feast, can and should lead humanity to reflect on the true passion for civilization, which, despite all the human suffering caused by wars and injustices, can dream of a new civilization.
Contractualism and Innocence
30
Mar
The great discussion of the contractualists was about the non-innocence of the person, they are
all defenders of the powers of the state and, ultimately, of in dubio pro societate (when in doubt, in favor of society and not of the defendant), Hobbes saw man as evil and the state should police it, Locke saw how it limited the powers of the state and gave the people the right to rebellion and Rousseau saw man as good, society is what corrupted him.
None of them denies the need and priority of state powers, as they were pillars of all modern country constitutions, and their update is in John Rawls and his successor Michael Sandel.
Both were Kantian idealists and utilitarians, but there is a small difference in that Sandel criticized Rawls’s voluntarism, according to which political and moral principles are legitimized from the exercise of individual will through choice or consent.
Locke’s empiricism claimed for this: “we are all, by nature, free, equal and independent, no one can be excluded from this situation and subjected to the political power of others without having given his consent” (1988, section 95).
In order to understand Sandel’s position, it is necessary to read at least the work that we indicate or clearly understand his examples, which seek to make his concepts practical and clear, in relation to belonging to groups, as a guarantee of collective interests (he rejects the term communitarianism). cites two cases: that of a French resistance pilot who during World War II refused to bomb his hometown, even though he knew that this would contribute to the liberation of France (2012, p. 279), belonging to his hometown.
The second example is that of a rescue operation organized by the government of Israel to save Ethiopian Jews from refugee camps in Sudan (2012, p. 280), belonging to the Jewish people.
However, in one of his famous lectures in which he gives other examples, and makes several dialogues with the audience, he is caught in contradiction when he gives the example of 6 patients arriving at an emergency room and 1 is in serious condition while the 5 patients who need donation of different organs to survive and the patient in serious condition requires a lot of care time, asks the question if he would let him die to help others.
Most people agreed to let him die, but a young man (in the photo) said he had another solution, out of the 5 who were about to die, the one who died first would donate his organs to the others, which left Sandel embarrassed and arrived at admit: “it’s a good idea, except for the fact that it destroyed the philosophical point of view” (see video below).
There are interpersonal and ontological relationships that go beyond mere subjectivity, it is something between beings and not just between beings and their cultures or belongings, it is in a kind of collective soul, in a noosphere where everything is more than logical, it is onto-logical.
(155) Justiça com Michael Sandel O Lado Moral do Assassinato – YouTube
LOCKE, J. (1690). “Second Treatise of Government”. In: Two Treatises of Cambridge Government: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
SANDEL, M. (2012) “Justice – what is to do the right thing”. Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian Civilization.
Political justice and innocence
29
Mar
State morality was developed together with the historical contractualist conception through 
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) in particular in his Leviathan, John Locke (1632-1704), founder of empiricism and Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), for him man is born good and society corrupts him.
In the social contract, individual rights are transferred to state power by a contract and so it can be said that it is the root of the principle in dubio pro societate (in doubt, society is defended), there is no presumption of innocence.
The transfer of powers to the state also transfers the end of innocence that implies not allowing the emotional development of children and adolescents in a family environment, and thus the discussion of criminal age starts to make sense, and the whole concept of justice becomes political .
The contemporary development of contractualism is in the philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002) for whom a metaphysical conception of morality is not possible, he develops the concept of “justice as fairness” presented in his book “A theory of Justice ”.
John Rawls profoundly influenced the thinking of Michael Sandel who is one of the most influential current thinkers in the western culture of justice and thus heir of contractualism, and both are heirs of the Kantian conception of morality.
One of the rare authors to analyze this position was Paul Ricoeur (1913-20050 in his book The Just (Vol. I), dedicating a good part of the text to the analysis of John Rawls and developing the idea of law in its peculiar position, a half way between morality and politics, without which it is utilitarian and not by chance was deeply influenced by the utilitarian thought of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873).
Equity is not possible without a personal human relationship, Ricoeur said: “The virtue of justice is established based on a relationship of distance with the other, as original as the relationship of proximity with the other offered in his face and in his voice” and this does not it is neither exact nor pragmatic.
RAWLS, John. (1997) Uma teoria da justiça. Tradução Almiro Pisetta e Lenita M. R. Esteves. Brazil, São Paulo: Martins Fontes.
RICOEUR, P. (1995) Le Juste 1. Paris : Éditions Esprit.
SANDEL, M.J. (2013) Como fazer a coisa certa. São Paulo: Civilização Brasileira.
