Arquivo para 2017
Trust, faith and autonomy
11
Aug
As Giddens has established, there is a boundary between faith and trust, but
inevitably those who have confidence will need some kind of faith to increase their security and thus their autonomy, without it drifting towards individualism or isolationism.
It is then possible to qualify the faith, let us turn to the mystics, and as Western-Christian civilization the figure of Jesus, the passage in which he walks on the waters scaring his disciples who think he is a ghost, is very illustrative and can tell us something of faith , so there is Matthew 28 to 30:
Then Peter said to him, “Lord, if it be you, let me go to meet you, walking on water.”
And Jesus answered, “Come!” Peter got out of the boat and began to walk on the water toward Jesus.
But when he felt the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!”
Even one of his main disciples after finding him to be a ghost, recognizes him and wishes to walk on the waters sinks, lacked confidence, faith and mainly autonomy.
The fact that followers of various mystical currents have little autonomy makes them a little childish, and dependent on almost everything of the master, that is why the master often dies, the disciples die, but Jesus did not die … it is another story, And it will take another kind of faith, though many proclaim the living God, present him dead.
An important qualifier for faith and his twin sister hope, and both are daughters of love, then faith must originate from something that is love, must distribute the trust and the desired good with other people and the environment, to Makes it “trustworthy” then this kind of faith is not blind, but a faith that has an “agapic act” that heals the environment.
The fact that the vast majority of religious groups function as closed systems and do not provide the environment with a sensible improvement, first in relationships and then in actions, and finally in faith; Is that it makes them a minefield of prejudices and evil, they want to be heard as masters, but they are small in listening and opening.
Walking on the water, the metaphor most often used is to say that it is a world that is agitated and agitated by injustice and lack of love, should not oppose an active and deep inner faith.
Trust those who have faith, but faith must come from a soul open to the world and to others.
Expert systems, trust and faith
10
Aug
The whole theory of Giddens, reviewed in some aspects in the previous posts, is
conditioned to the structuring and what he calls expert systems, but these in turn are based on what he calls trust also already explained in the posts, highlighting the question of faith .
Expert systems, as seen by Giddens, are the most important undocking mechanism, described as “systems of technical excellence or professional competence that organize large areas of the material and social environments in which we live today.” Although most lay people consult, only periodically, professionals but all of them under great suspicion, for this reason so many new theories and so many “alternative systems”.
Although the author admits that faith: “Trust is inevitably partly an article of faith” (Giddens, 1991, page 39), but adds: “There is a pragmatic element in faith, based on the experience that these systems [experts] usually work as they are expected to do “(idem).
Finally, he admits that although faith and trust “are closely linked” makes a distinction between the two, and the distinction Luhmann makes in his work on Trust and Power (Chichester: Wiley, 1979) is based. very vague.
It is important to say that this faith is not the exclusive property of Western cosmo-gonies (not cosmologies), in fact all religions, even non-Western religions, will have some form of faith, which it is necessary to distinguish from belief as belief in one God (monotheistic religions) or in many (Polytheists), where not only humans but also animals, plants, rocks, natural characteristics have “soul” without differentiating them from the physical world.
Faith is an adherence to some hypothesis that the person accepts without any rational proof and this is in the etymological origin of the Latin fide, reason here does not have the modern meaning, but the one of reasoning done in the mind, so it would not be blind, but only Before any reasoning, a modern epoché, that is, it has a form of reason that is to accept things beyond our preconceptions.
It means ultimately a step forward not in the dark, but in the mystery and even more importane than this is to find it forward, it means to move beyond the boundary of the “system.”
Most people take this step by meeting (apparently) an abyss, an emptiness, but they could do it consciously (so it is not totally blind) if you believed in what lies ahead, like you do and have faith that everything the RCA Rockefeller Center, taken on Sept. 20, 1932 and published in the New Herald Tribune on October 2 of that year, is like the classic photo of workers on a suspended beam in what would be today.
Postmodernity, a return to the beginning and the current
09
Aug
The author (Anthony Giddens) we are reading, does exactly in the chapter of “trust” na
approach to nihilism by criticizing Nietszche and Heidegger, with which we disagree, but it does not fail to emphasize the importance of both,
The first to have broken with the Enlightenment, and the second (although he does not say directly) that the “new perspective” (which of the Enlightenment ??) surpassed the “tradition of dogma” the author says that “postmodernism has been associated not only with the end of acceptance of foundations as the ‘end of history'” (p. 60) which is true, but a brief distinction must be made between post-Modernity and postmodernism, the first is the phenomenon that since Nietszche is pointing, but developed with Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer, the second is the idea that the phenomenon itself is already a new stage of humanity.
It calls for the exercise of trying to approximate the issue of consciousness history (name I consider more correct for historicity, see Truth and Method of Gadamer) of “futurology” and will call “undoing” this idea that after mapping the past can be
Presupposes “a future orientation of this kind” (p.61), then it resumes the “elucidation of modern thought”, but it does not fail to make conventional discourse; “This process as a process of globalization, a term that must have a key position in the lexicon of the social sciences” (p.62), which is still a discourse that “disengages” with tradition, to use
The author’s own argument, one must revise the Enlightenment without appealing to it.
The discourse and here we find contradictions in its model of trust, the “reflective appropriation of knowledge” that tries to deny the progress of the Enlightenment period by saying: “displaced social life from the fixity of tradition,” which he calls “symbolic fixes and systems Dangers “that in fact involve trust is placed in a systemic model because it sees it as distinct from the model of” belief based on weak inductive knowledge “, it is also a belief, the problem is precisely putting it in dialogue with tradition to emerge the new.
It sees knowledge with a “differential power” with some individuals or groups more apt to acquire them, but the process of globalization of knowledge is not the inverse?
Do we agree with the power of values and the impact of unintended consequences, according to their concept that “to social life transcends the intentions of those who apply it for transformative purposes,” is not this the question of historical consciousness?
Its double hermeneutics, which sees it as “the circulation of social knowledge” that must be applied “reflexively” would alter the original circumstances, is pure romanticism.
It will allude to its key category, which is globalization, with some different approaches from other authors, but within the closed view of those who follow the system model, it does not coincidentally begin with considerations about McLuhann.
Without considering the paradox of the neo-positivist Kurt Gödel, who asserted that the system already has its internal contradictions and can only be proved as true by an external assertion, in the case of postmodernity that is already external, we must dialogue with the tradition for That its key concepts: liberalism, capitalism, state, logic, legality, among many others, are made not only in a double hermeneutic but in an open hermeneutics where the preconceptions of any “closed” hermeneutics can be overcome.
Confidence what is it?
08
Aug
As we have said the theme of trust is a recurring theme in postmodernity, but what
does it really mean, because exactly this theme has entered this time of change?
The responses of Giddens (1991) are very relevant and bring good reflections, from the page to page 65 that we read in two steps, first 9 questions of confidence:
1 – It is related to an absence in time and space, although some authors give preference to time (Being and time, for example) and others to space (movements occupy themselves and the thoughts of “engagement”). Clarifies: There would be no need to trust anyone if their attitudes and thought processes were visible.
2 – Confidence is “basically linked” to contingency and not risk as can be assumed, that is, credibility must be given to contingent results, whether in relation to the action of individuals or systems.
3 – Confidence is different from faith in a person or system, it is that which derives from this faith, so has little faith that little trust, it is the link between faith and belief, according to Giddens, is this that distinguishes it from “inductive knowledge Weak, “for in a sense it must be” blind. ”
4 – The author speaks in confidence in symbolic tokens or expert systems, but of course, this isn´t based on faith, it may be of a certain faith in systems, but “it refers rather to proper functioning than to its operation as such,” Here many are deceived.
6 – In modernity, trust exists in contexts: a) general awareness of human activity, b) broadly expanded transformative scope of human action, by modern institutions, but the concept of risk replaces that of fortune, but does not mean that the pre -moderns had no notion of risk or danger, only that natural causes and chance replaced religious cosmologies, read for example “Chance and Chaos” by D. Ruelle.
7 – Risk and danger are closely linked, but they are not the same, risk presupposes danger, but danger is an ill-calculated and inconsequential risk.
8 – Risk and trust are intertwined, trust serves to reduce or minimize hazards.
9 – Risk is not an individual issue, there are “risk environments” and the tradition or the term that I prefer to use “the original culture” is a way of integrating and monitoring the space-time action of a community.
I did not skip the fifth one, it was just to emphasize it is possible as the author says, at this point “a definition” that is the “credibility belief” of a certain person or system, in view of “results and events together” , Of course this is wrapped in “love” or “principles.”
Here we understand why it is postmodern, for this must presuppose values and we will return to this.
GIDDENS, Anthony. The consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Univ. Stanford Press, 1990.
Post-modernity and Confidence
07
Aug
The book of Anthony Giddens which refers to the consequences Modernity 
analyzes that the “style, custom of life or social organization that emerged in Europe from the seventeenth century and which subsequently became more or less world-wide in its in fl uence” (Giddens 1991, P. 17-20) discusses the (in) existence of a “post-modernity” that is not of the least importance, since it is only a terminological question, since we know that modernity has passed, and that today it is not enough to invent new ones Terms of understanding social phenomena, but to say what in fact is the very nature of Modernity.
Among the various topics covered there is a recurring theme in my reading, which is the rhythm of the change of the era of Modernity and the scope of change, since some of the social transformations already penetrate virtually the whole world and with this the intrinsic nature of the great institutions Modern, without any correspondence in previous historical periods, already happen, for example, “the political system of the nation-state, wholesale dependence on the production of inanimate energy sources, or complete transformation into commodities and wage labor,” a Ideals such as Hegel intended that these institutions be “eternal.”
A second relevant is the relation to knowledge, for him “sociological knowledge spirals inside and outside the universe of social life, reconstituting both this universe and itself as an integral part of this process” (Giddens, 1991, 24). ) As modern scientism wants, but it also seems to be in check.
The third and particularly important theme is the subject of confidence, which has already been dealt with by authors such as Niklas Luhmann and Talcot Parsons, Giddens says, citing the definition of trust conveyed by the Oxford English Dictionary, which would be understood as “belief or credit in some quality or attribute Of a person or thing, or the truth of an affirmation “(GIDDENS, 1991: 38).
Giddens warns of the shift from this theme to that of systems, as in Luhmann’s case, where:
“One of the meanings of this, in a situation in which many aspects of Modernity have become globalized, is that no one can choose to leave completely out of the abstract systems involved in modern institutions. This is most obviously the case for phenomena such as the risk of nuclear war or ecological catastrophe. “(GIDDENS, 1991, p. 88).
Both the belief idea and the credit idea for the author are in some way linked to the idea of faith.
Giddens himself clarifies that Luhmann distinguishes faith and trust, emphasizing that this must be understood especially in relation to risk, a term originating from the modern age.
Without concluding what is meant by still trust, postmodernity refers, in Giddens’s view to the process in which: “all preexisting foundations of epistemology are revealed without credibility; that history is devoid of teleology and consequently no version of progress can be plausibly defended; And that a new social and political agenda has arisen … “(GIDDENS, 1991, p. 36).
GIDDENS, A. The Consequences of modernity. Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1990. (pages is numer of brazilian edition).
The emptiness and transfiguration: spiritual or existential
04
Aug
The transcendence of Kant and all idealism is nothing but the existential 
negation of the object, or we would say in Husserl’s reasoning the object-in-the-world, his worldhood, but what happens in this variation between my perception and the world?
According to Husserl, the objects of the world come from various perspectives (Abschattungen), so a chair before me can be apprehended under various variations of profile (Abschattung).
In order to apprehend according to epoché, the object must be subjected to the various possible variations of profile in order to grasp the essence of that same object, that is, what remains unchanged in it, and this is its phenomenological reduction (epoché) or a debug of the phenomenon in order to reach the object with total evidence, the essence of the phenomenon, that is, its eidos (whence the modern idea came), but this variation is objective and subjective at the same time, this is called the ” .
We then come to epoché, to make a complete emptiness using the transcendental reduction, where we plunge into a state that may seem a loss of consciousness of the real world, but instead of making the phenomenon more problematic, by re-presenting the phenomenon transcendentally, It is more conscious, more evident. In the biblical passage of the transfiguration, where Jesus appears “transfigurated”, the apostles wanted to stay there because of the “eidetic” world.
Next we present the beautiful picture of Giovanni Bellini that represents the figure, we see the Trinity having Jesus in the center and two more figures Because the idealistic reason is incapable of becoming truly eidetic, that is, seeing the same person in three profiles, and more serious, one human, one extremely divine and happy the third is neither a dove nor a fire But another human figure, the Renaissance Bellini was not yet an idealist (see a peasant in his normal life), but there was still the dualism of heaven and earth, the apostles wanted to remain there.
But Jesus wants to descend from Mount Tabor and Back to earth: The gospel of Matthew says that Peter thought they were three biblical people, saying, “Peter answered and said, Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will make three tents here: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. Peter was still speaking, when a luminous cloud covered them with his shadow … came a voice saying: This is my beloved son … “, human and transcendent, needed councils to establish the divine and human nature of Jesus.
The Trinity is still ‘hidden’ for those who only deify or humanize subjects and objects, then the ‘relational world’ remains complicated, this is the cultural and spiritual crisis of the modern world, ner subjects neither objects, this is existential nihil.
The emptiness and the epoché in Husserl
03
Aug
If there is any similarity between the Husserlian epoché and the methodical doubt of
Descartes, it is simple appearance, for the epoché (put in brackets) served for Husserl to enter the core of the appearances of things to consciousness.
Thus this supposed resemblance between the two philosophers does not authorize it to mean that the epoché, in putting the world aside, doubts the existence of things, and this doubt will lead to idealism, with the critique of “pure” Reason of Kant and others That there will come a dualism between the objective and subjective worlds.
With Husserl’s epoché one does not properly pretend to doubt the existence of the world and its objects, much less to reject the intuition we have to know it, reducing consciousness to some kind of transcendence.
The world will be anchored only in the aspect as it presents itself in consciousness “eeduced to consciousness”, as we have already argued here, Husserl’s phenomenological method promotes a revision in the Cartesian cogito.
The Husserlian method of phenomenological reduction brings with it other notions that must be presented here: the transcendent and the transcendental, being the transcendent, the consciousness as Husserl sees it, is the everyday and habitual perception we have of the things of the world, not a chair But this chair, this tree, this book, so the transcendental “is the perception that consciousness has of itself” (Brazilian Philosohpy dictionary ABBAGNANO, 2000, p. 973).
One can then say that “the transcendent is the outer world” while the transcendental “is the inner world” of consciousness (HUSSERL, 2008, p.18), thus redefined the notions of noema and noesis, since they existed in antiquity .
This emptiness to apprehend the object, since it happens in ‘pure consciousness’ or ‘transcendental’, it is the experiences entirely lose their psychological and existential character to preserve only the pure relation of the fully purified subject to the object as conscious, and this is To uncover, to know.
There is a distinction between the perceived object and the noema: “the noema is distinct from the object itself, which is the thing, eg the object of the tree’s perception is the tree, but the noema of that perception is the complex of predicates And ways of being given by experience. ” (Brazilian Philosohpy dictionary ABBAGNANO, 2000, p.724).
To what extent this experience can be “transcendental” is the ultimate question.
Aspects of phenomenology
02
Aug
Both the so-called “pure” sciences and other experimental sciences depart
from empirical data or “practical” hypotheses to develop their postulates, Husserl warned that the instability of empirical data as well as much of the theoretical postulates do not provide the necessary rigor as regards To philosophical inquiry.
In essential aspects, positivist science or its field of analysis to the experimental, or considers as “phenomenon” regions that are veiled by some methodological rigor limiting a general analysis more comprehensive and not explanatory of certain phenomena.
What Husserl understood as a “comprehensive analysis” is that which refers to consciousness and this in turn is based on experiences (Erlebnis) of the world occur in and through consciousness, henceforth its postulate “all consciousness is consciousness of something”.
It is in this perspective that Husserl takes from his master Franz Brentano his most essential category of intentionality, so intention is a general characteristic of this consciousness.
This is the first point in the analysis of the phenomenon, so different from the Cartesian cogito which gains a new meaning from the intentionality (the consciousness of something) that, contrary to being “clear and distinct” as Descartes wanted, is directed (intends) to something.
In addition to the intentionality Husserl considers intuition and apodic evidence, being the intention of an object (the example is a book on the table), there being the “meaningful content” (Bedeutungsintention) of something, then “we mean intentionally” (meinen) some Object, without even considering its presence,
Intuition is then the fulfillment of an intention, then it may consider “evidence” to be the consciousness of intention, therefore it is intuitive but insofar as there is a “consciousness of the phenomenon”, and in this sense it is apodictic, ie it is self-evident , there is no need for empirical evidence.
A last aspect is the hylé, the “subjective matter” that composes any perception, although there are the “hiletic data” that would be “constituted by the sensible contents, which comprise, besides the external sensations, also the feelings, impulses, etc. ” (ABBAGNANO dictionary, 2000, page 499). Are not only the “matter” upon which consciousness is given, and are not empirical.
Then appears the Husserlian epoché, which is the parenthesis, we will explore later.
The importance of Husserl’s phenomenology
01
Aug
The importance of Husserl’s phenomenology is that he performed at one stroke
the criticism of psychologism, through his most advanced post of his master Franz Brentano, to the characteristic relativism of our time and modernity and to historicism in a work little known to JF Lyotard) he stressed: “the Cartesian hope of a Mathesis universalis is reborn in Husserl” (1957: 6), although Lyotard later criticizes it.
The theme of epoché is not to return to a return to the classical theme of antiquity, but to what he called the “thesis of a presupposition: man is immersed in a kind of general ‘, ie an implicit understanding of the world; The world is then essentially familiar to man, and it is within this naturality that one intends to say what it is to know the real:
“I am aware of a world that extends endlessly in space, which has an endless development in time … I discover [the world] by an immediate intuition, I have experience of it” (1991: 37).
He understands by a natural attitude, that which does not cease “to realize the world as ontologically valid … My life in all its acts is part oriented to the being that belongs to that world, … are interests by things of the The world, being realized in acts concerning these things, as long as they are correlate of my intention. “(1989, 519).
So it is about this “being in the world” (Husserl was a pupil of Heidegger and his expression is earlier), it is a Selbstverständlichkeit, and this can not be doubted, then how is his epoché realized? Is to become skeptical and like this as abstention from the inconstancy in the “spectacle of the world,” or what Husserl defined as “distance from naive natural validations” (Husserl, 1989, 154), but clarifies that it is not the “Criticism of knowledge”.
The consciousness of the natural environment as an “existing reality” (perhaps perhaps Heidegger took his Dasein), but he questions the duration of this attitude: “It is something that persists as long as the attitude lasts, that is, as much as the life of consciousness Vigilante follows its natural course “(Husserl, 1991, p.96).
What is important and this is in his booklet Cartesian Meditations, it is not a question of establishing a “universal doubt” because it does not put the being in doubt, but only its attributes, so assumes universalist tensions, and now it is the phenomenology that can, with propriety , To be conceived as transcendental, since it allows for epoché a “total alteration of the natural attitude of life” (Husserl, 1989, 168), putting objectivity as such in check.
The epoché is then “a certain suspension of the insurrection which is compounded by a persuasion of the truth that remains unshaken” (Husserl 1991: 100).
When we operate this original epoch, Lyotard’s study of phenomenology in 1956 also pointed this out, shows the insufficiency that Descartes’s radical procedure as a doubt had limitations, as Husserl says:
“Since every thesis or judgment can be modified with full freedom, and that every object on which judgment is referred can be put in parentheses, there would remain no room for unmodified judgments, let alone for a science.” Husserl, 1989, p.102).
HUSSERL, E. The crisis des sciences européennes et la phénoménologie transcedentale. Trad. G. Large. Paris: Gallimard, 1989.
HUSSERL, E. Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie. Trad. Paul Ricoeur. Paris> Gallimard, 1991.
What is missing on the 4th. Industrial Revolution
31
Jul
I read the book of the creator of the World Forum of Economics, 
Klaus Schwab, it is amazing the scenario that describes, going through the digital world calls the digital cash accounting system, the blockchain, “book-reason distributed” (mistranslated in portuguese that is book-box) by stating that “it creates trust by allowing people who do not know (and thus have no underlying basis of trust) to collaborate without having to go through a neutral central authority – that is, a central accounting or depository. “(Schwab, 2016, 27), going from the physical category to the biological world, but perhaps something is lacking: a” soul “for all this.
Skeptics and fundamentalists will continue to cry: unfair! Power of technoscience! An authentic dehumanization! Yes it may be, but simply protesting or twisting the nose will not make the rapid and dizzying advance of technology receding, not even the ecological appeal, more technology is often more ecology, see the LEDs, solar energy and control now possible by Sensing devices in plants, forests and even microorganisms.
Perhaps a problem that deserves serious questioning is inequality, but Schwab did not shy away from it by explaining the emergence of “innovation-oriented ecosystems, offering new ideas, business models, products and services on pages 94-95. Those people who can only offer less skilled jobs or common capital “(Schwab, 2016, p.94), and concludes” the present world is very unequal “(p.95).
The phenomenon of inequality is undoubtedly the most worrying, even in countries that can be thought less unequal, the Gini index for example in China, the author points out, rose from 30 in the 1980s to 45 in 2010.
It further points out that levels of inequality: “increase segregation and reduce the educational outcomes of children and young adults.” (Ibid., 95), this has changed, for example, the so-called “middle class” pattern in the USA and United Kingdom has the price of “a luxury good,” says the author.
Contrary to what one might think, the Global Risks Report of the 2016 World Forum speaks of “de-empowerment” of the citizen, although there are campaigns like “get-out-the-vote”, since in Many countries voting is not mandatory, but the content we consume online are miserable, lack truth and fact, and they influence it.
The author does not lack the concepts of identity, morality and ethics, expressed in the chapter on page 100, talks about OpenAI, an initiative chaired by Sam Altman, president of Y Cominator and Elon Musk and CEO of the revolutionary Tesla Motors, who believes that the best way To develop the AI is to make it free for all and to make it be invested to improve human beings, but its program is abstract and unrealistic, although it presents it in the H frame the ethical limit.
It is necessary to discover in the fissures of the technological advance aspects of development of human sensibility, of appreciation for the Other, where collaborative and coworking environments favor this, but what you hear is still a fundamentalist shout against technology.
