Posts Tagged ‘natural’
The wisdom of pure thoughts
01
Oct
Simplicist is naive thinking, while simplicity is pure thinking, pure noesis.
It is not in the capacity for theoretical elaboration, in the bookish
culture that resists wisdom, it unites simplicity (which is not simplistic) and complexity in the sense of putting everything under the cloak of nature and the universe and understanding that there is original knowledge that is not simplistic, but they were elaborated in real contact with nature, so I reject the idea of naturalization.
Culturalization is what has taken over the natural and perverted it, said philosopher, writer and indigenous leader Ailton Krenak of the current pandemic crisis: “Earth is speaking to humanity: ‘silence.’ This is also the meaning of withdrawal.”
Much of Western culture is in crisis, because it has brutally seized nature and does not want to understand it and has difficulty understanding visible and clear signs, this crisis comes from before the current technological revolution, many philosophers at the beginning of the century XX pointed to her, and the silence asked by Krenak can also be what Theodor Adorno identifies as true contemplation: “The bliss of contemplation consists in disenchanted enchantment.” Theodor Adorno, I remember that this philosopher is neither mystic nor religious.
Ailton Krenak wrote “Ideas to postpone the end of the world” (Cia. da Letras, s/a), within an indigenous cosmovision, but aware that this is a planetary problem, he said in an interview with Daily Estado de Minas (03 /04/2020): “I don’t understand where there is something other than nature. Everything is nature. The cosmos is nature. All I can think of is nature”, denouncing that the way we live is artificial and not in keeping with human nature.
Interpreting the book by Davi Kapenawa, another indigenous leader, Viveiro de Castro and Danowski also see that our “cultured” and Western thinking is concentrated in the world of merchandise, and Kapenawa says: “white people dream a lot, but they only dream of themselves”, that is, with its own culture without being able to contemplate a wider world, where everyone is present.
These worldviews may seem naive, but they mean that we must always think beyond our culture, also the Christian worldview calls for this effort, and after teaching his apostles what the master himself should go through, and they still don’t understand, Jesus will make use of of a new metaphor for them to think in a purer and less culturalized way.
In chapter 10 of the Gospel of Mark, seeing that they wanted to keep the children away from him, He says (Mk 10:14-15): “Let the children come to me. Do not forbid them, because the Kingdom of God belongs to those who are like them. Truly I say to you: whoever does not receive the Kingdom of God as a child will not enter it”.
The world to come, in different worldviews, even if they seem childish, shows the crisis and exhaustion of cultural thought in our time, and the exhaustion of natural means.
Between the natural and the Supernatural
10
Sep
The soul (anima in its original Greco-Latin version) was studied by 
almost all ancient philosophers, it can be summarized from the Latin “anima mundi” (soul of the world) as a cosmological concept of a ruling force of the universe by which the divine becomes manifested in laws that affect matter, or in the hypothesis of an immaterial force, as something inseparable from matter, is in Plato in the books The Republic and Timaeus.
Marsilio Vicino, Renaissance humanist, who wrote a Platonic Theology, defined it as “The soul can be called the center of nature, the intermediary of all things, the current of the world, the essence of everything, the knot and union of the world” , whatever the concept, it is a part of the natural that may have manifestations unknown to current science, and that is why it is supernatural.
But the natural that man seemed to dominate from the Enlightenment, revealed to the few more mysterious than imagined, at the beginning of the century the uncertainty principle gave rise to quantum physics and a tiny virus challenges us, and we have not overcome it, the relaxation can provoke a new crisis, like a poorly cured patient who wants to do activities that the disease does not allow.
In his book The Nature of Nature, not by chance his first book on his method of complexity, Edgar Morin will describe the Dasein of nature (from physis) as: “All systems, even those we abstractly and arbitrarily isolate from sets of which they are part (like the atom, which is moreover a partially ideal object, or like the molecule), they are necessarily rooted in the physis” (Morin, 1977, p. 133), and quoting Lupasco (creator of the idea of the included third party, state between being and non-being of matter): “A system can only be energetic” (idem).
Energy, complexity and mystery is therefore a characteristic of nature, and we have discovered over the last century that uncertainty must not only be part of a truly scientific method, its absence can lead to dogma and obscurantism.
How the supernatural manifests itself then depends on the cosmovision of each culture, without being confused with it, as it has a unique meaning within the eschatology that sees it, the beginning and end of everything, of the universe and its enigmas.
In Christian culture, the supernatural is present in the human revelation of a God who makes himself small, and the human condition is reduced to take him to the coming of eternity. Jesus forbade the apostles to speak openly about his divinity, but he questioned them (Mk 8.27-29):
“Who do men say that I am?”. They replied, “some say you are John the Baptist, some say you are Elijah, some say you are one of the prophets.” Then he asked: “And you, who do you say that I am?” Peter replied, “You are the Messiah.”
He talked separately with the disciples and was going to explain the kind of death he was going to die.
MORIN, E. THE METHOD 1. A natureza da NATUREZA (The nature of NATURE). Portugal: Europe-America Editions, 1977.
The natural and the cultural
09
Sep
The word naturalization is widely used at this time in history, 
and so this idea of the natural that permeates Western culture since classical antiquity is explained here, which actually exists is a dichotomy between culture and the natural.
The renaissance was a great movement of transformation in Western culture, the universe became infinite, new lands and new peoples entered the history of the Old World and this climate put everything in discussion, Italian humanism was one of these stages of historical movements, we quote Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Vicino and their works, but Dante Aligheri is more cited.
Dante’s Ulysses will cross the Pillars of Hercules of scientific knowledge, philosophy, technique, mathematics, arts and letters, challenging previous dogmas, but physics and the domain of nature are placed on opposite sides, although the Copernican Revolution is the great symbol of this turn, it will be the domain of nature that will develop in the next moment.
The idea of limitlessness, predictability, and certainties accompanied the philosophy of modernity until the advent of quantum physics, while science sought the domain of the natural, and we now see the consequences of this domain on the planet in ecological crisis, point physics The beginning of the Copernican revolution continued to move towards the mystery of particles to atomic subparticles, from harmonic universe to chaos with black holes, with worm paths that contradict absolute time.
The uncertainties reached science, and Edgar Morin recalls that one of the consequences of the current pandemic in an interview stated: “We do not know the political, economic, national and planetary consequences of the restrictions caused by the confinements. We don’t know whether to expect the worst, the best, or both mixed up: we are heading towards new uncertainties”, and this is the future.
The naturalization of historical contexts (race, ethnicity and sexism, for example), is actually a culturalization (although the term does not exist), and the so-called scientific epistemologies were important for this, mainly from a historical point of view, where they were transformed into culture because they were not natural and not even real, but versions of history.
The planet, society and civilization are asking for a truce, and we do not know if it will be possible to deliver it, the climate is increasingly tense, and a consequence that we did not expect from the pandemic (which should push us towards solidarity) is that we are more divided than before, the truce will be difficult.
Humanism and the natural
08
Sep
We have difficulty in understanding what is really natural and what is cultural,
the naturalist view of pre-Socratic philosophy already anticipated a web of laws and interpretations of the material world, not exactly giving the configuration of what Being was, it was in this space that it developed the idea of the subject as dual of the object, so subjectivity is not seen as cultural, but natural.
Heraclitus’ scarce references, what remains of him are just a few maxims as you cannot cross the same river twice, the idea of becoming and fire as a primordial element in nature, hide a search for human identity with a prevailing objectivist tone , was the path opened by Socrates to themes as important today as interiority and conscience.
Moral conscience was only resumed within the scope of Christianity, leaving aside Plato and Aristotle, who elaborated the idea of the immobile engine (the principle of the whole universe and thus of nature) but separated from the world of ideas, where “naturalistic” ideas developed , did not postulate a regnum hominis, a kingdom of man, of course there will be other readings from this period.
What encouraged me was Karl Popper’s description of The World of Parmenides as a period of the genesis of the Enlightenment, the Greek physis is nothing but nature, so it can be said as more property that physicalist naturalism begins there. , an extension of the perception that the human subject has its interiority linked to the living environment, and therefore cultural, an understanding of the individual or collective macrocosm (of cultural groups) is then linked to the idea of nature without a broader cosmovision being contemplated.
To this question there is another one, about the emergence of the subject canceling the Being, which is freedom, subject is only as action, that is, as a function of the object, interiority is then a problematic part of an individual or collective subjectivism, and not a freedom of choice over which it manifests itself.
If man in his universe can only submit to the laws, to his destiny, he is not free, there is no place for autonomy, and in a broader sense he is subject to fatalism, in Aristotle a one-dimensional concept of freedom is traced. It, as a free being, is one who has himself as an end and who is not subject to menial work, is defined, therefore, around the polis, and its laws.
If the anthropocentric concept is revisited today, it is important to understand its Greek roots.
The Renaissance philosophy will develop a humanism, as the man at the center of all speculation, being a creature of the world he enjoys, however, a unique and very exceptional situation, I highlight Nicolau de Cusa, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola.
Ficino is the least known, born in Figlini Valdarno (1433) and the greatest representative of Renaissance Fiorentine humanism, and revisits the works of Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry and Proclus.
Perhaps the reason for being little known may be due to the fact that he became a priest and wrote the Theologia Platonica (1482), a work that makes a dialogue with Plato’s conception of religion and the Neoplatonists.
