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Arquivo para September, 2018

Truth and deeds

14 Sep

 It may seem strange to the modern discourse that the truth is beyond the facts, it is because what is factual is considered what would be beyond acting and thinking, but it is not, would say the Brazilian writer Rubem Alves: “Beauty is beyond words “.

That is why Heidegger, Gadamer, and Byung-Chul Han and others, of course, could not speak of the truth without ceasing to keep the work of art in mind, not for the idealistic conception of “beauty” but for that which is between action and contemplation.

One of the most beautiful arts that is theater, not coincidentally has pieces divided into “acts”, but that should not be called re-presentation, presentation only, see it live is almost an imposition, see it filmed becomes something else or cinema or television, now Web videos, which are successful, but this yes are re-presentations, with many fakes.

And what should direct our actions, is in the previous post to quotation from Gadamer: ” what man needs is not only the persistent positioning of fundamental questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now “(Gadamer, 1987) and not a new modern mythology.

The truth of the acts has always been difficult to accept and even understand for men, what has always been “beyond words” in the acts, says the evangelist Mark (8: 27-29) about the acts of Jesus and that his disciples attended: “Who do men say that I am?” They answered, “Some say that you are John the Baptist; others that are Elijah; others, still, that you are one of the prophets.” Then he asked, “And you, who do you say that I am?” Even though they doubted Peter said he was the Messiah, but they said “he does all things well.”

The post-factual or post-truth today is only shocking nowadays by the number of narratives and the number of people capable of following modern pseudo-mythologies, they want only the facts that are appropriate, but the coherence of the acts remains as rare as it was in all the history.

The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire gives the sentence: “It is fundamental to reduce the distance between what is said and what is done, in such a way that in a given moment your speech is your practice”.

 

There is way, this is a method

13 Sep

Beyond the historical truth, opposed to hermeneutics (Shcleimacher) and romantic historicism (Dilthey), Gadamer deals with the question of truth linked to both religion and art, a transdisciplinary anticipation, and perhaps perhaps its “method” (see our previous post the Ricoeur question), put it this way: “A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the ‘standpoint of art’ can deliver.

The Romantic desire for a new mythology… gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a ‘secular saviour’ for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes.” (Gadamer, 1989),  of course, salvation here would be earthly and not heavenly.

In fact, it is what we understand by history that makes us skating at levels of tradition, says Gadamer on history “In truth history does not belong to us but rather we to it.” (Gadamer, 1989)

Gadamer explains the difficulties not only historical, but mainly the prejudices linked to tradition: “It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition.” (Gadamer, 1989)

And agree in this dialog´s difficult: “We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said…Understanding does not occur when we try to intercept what someone wants to say to us by claiming we already know it.”

It indicates how to put this into practical and real plans: “What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself.” (Gadamer, 1989)

It is necessary to foresee (virtually) possibilities, but to be able to adapt them within the real possibilities, so there is no romantic hermeneutics or historicism, both must bear in mind the realities and interpret them.

Gadamer, H.G. Truth and Method, 2nd edn, Sheed and Ward, London 1989.

 
 

The truth and / or method?

12 Sep

The positive truth established by science and the enlightenment had two foundations: the idea (idealism) linked to experience (empiricism), whose inglorious attempt was to create a universal encyclopedia of knowledge, Kant’s sapere audi great achievements of modernity were insufficient to abolish the war, created a crisis of values, a concentration of riches and a worldview with signs of fragility.
What transdisciplinarity and sober educators are demanding, a return to life-giving sciences, the humanistic perennials, Heidegger’s Charter on Humanism, in which he cries: “But in this we must not forget that” subject and object ” are inadequate expressions of the metaphysics which took over very early on the interpretation of language, in the form of Western “Logic” and “Grammar” (Heidegger, 2005: 8).
What we call interpretation, Heidegger asserts in paragraph 32 of “Being and Time” (it is mentioned in “Truth and Method”), is actually developing “the projected possibilities of understanding”, it means a dialogic process where it is possible to retrieve the pre-concepts and a new “fusion of horizons”, in this sense the Hermetic is opposed to the hermeneutic.
The preconception, seen as anticipation of human experience, attests to our bond to the tradition in which we are immersed, but we need what Gadamer calls “consciousness of the history of effects” (possible translation of “Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein”), as explained in her text “determined by a real historical becoming, in such a way that it does not have the liberty to situate itself in the face of the past”, hence its criticism of Dilthey.
Our estrangement from the truth, Gadamer begins with aesthetics, a culture of appearances – through which his book begins, recapitulates in the idealists the ideas of taste and experience (“Erlebnis”), the latter always put more emphasis, albeit in ways in Dilthey and Husserl.

They will be developed in such a way as to falsify the “sciences of the spirit” (see in his work “The Extension of the Question of Truth to Understanding in the Sciences of the Spirit”), in an analytical effort to concretize the so- his whole critique of Schleiermacher’s romantic hermeneutics, the “Aufklärung” (Illustration), and the historicism of Droysen, Ranke, Dilthey, and Hegel.
His criticism goes to the bottom of the notion of aesthetics of a work of art, when a painter, with certain technique or style, goes to painting with a certain technique, what is read in the picture is not the soul of artist.

Her analysis is also from the hermeneutic analytic, in criticizing Schleiermacher also gives reason to say that in the work of an artist, a poet, a writer would be the foundation to perceive the authorial intention, so the exegete would know more closely than his own author and not only his letter or painting, to know the Gospel of St. John would be, first of all, to know Saint John, in which Gadamer rejects the postulate of the Romantic school.
But he will accept the romantic school in “Let’s face the facts” of “Aufklärung”: “he reads the Johannine text as Protestant, as a Catholic, a third as a historian of Palestine.” If we swept all these presuppositions, perhaps in the written lines,
pristine, “now the Aufklärung” desired the
meeting of an unprejudiced interpretation, which would remove both the tradition of authority and the authority of tradition (ie idealism!), in which the romantics were right.
There remain two snags, Sloterdijk’s answer to Heidegger and Ricoeur’s question: would it then be Truth or Method (or, not and), that is, truly ontological?

 

Brief history of the lie

11 Sep

People always tell stories in a way that their story seems a little better than it is, understand story with h are not those of the books, but the facts for which there are artifacts, which in law is called instrumental proof.
One could go in classical antiquity, where we would find Diogenes to look for an honest man with a flashlight, I would say today In times of partisanship, which seem more fanciful football fanatics or some kind of fundamentalist belief, the truth is distorted everywhere, the recent fact in Brazil of the Bolsonaro stab had from conspiracy theories of a poorly executed crime, to whoever defended that it was all a staging, this said by intellectuals … amazing.
In recent history I find the thinker and poet of the Spanish Modernism António Machado y Ruiz, who wrote La verdad is also invented, so fake news are older, what has changed now is that intellectuals of little notoriety and ignorant people can also do so, and with it to gain a false reputation, but it is in fact notoriety.
Antonio Machado y Ruiz and encounter three very interesting phrases: “Never lose contact with the ground because only then will you have an approximate idea of ​​your height”, and “if it is good to live, it is better to dream, and the best is to wake up” , but we should always wake up and sometimes this requires pruning, cuts would say, that the more mature the deeper.
I remember Cecilia Meirelles’s phrase: “I learned from the primroses to let myself be cut and to return always in full,” I also remember the Poem by Mário de Andrade, The Valuable Time of the Mature.
In the novel The Less Traveled Way, Scott Peck makes a statement to think: “It may seem less objectionable to fool the rich than the poor, but it is a mistake. Under the law, there are differences between committing a fraud in a business, handing over the fake income statement, using scrapbooks on a test, or saying at home that you stayed to work late when you are unfaithful. It is true that some mistakes are worse than others, but in reality they are not all lies and betrayals, “he would say in politics, to” believers.”
I remember once again Antonio Machado y Ruiz: “It is proper for men of medium-sized heads to invest against everything that does not fit in their heads,” those who invest the most against others have dogmatic truth, medium wisdom (if any) and arrogance to pounds.
I continue to invest in education that is neither dogmatic nor pragmatic, but the hermeneutics of the one who always doubts and is always open to the thought of the Other.

 

The Crystal Palace and the digital era

10 Sep

Byung Chull Han describes in her that the concepts of telecommunications, she was previous and fundamental to the internet, must be reflected with great ontological seriousness, since it is the one that designates the procedural form of densification in numbers of interactions and monetary values, it is calculated that there are ten million e-mails per minute and one trillion dollars a day (VÁSQUEZ ROCCA, 2012).
This high density occurs both in the greater and easier possibility of meeting between agents, either in the form of (relational?) Transactions or in the form of collisions, and this describes in a certain way what resembles the so-called Crystal Palace (idem) .
The Crystal Palace of London in 1850 already housed Universal Exhibitions and also recreation centers dedicated to “education of the people”, this sophisticated architecture, one of the most imposing in the nineteenth century, anticipated a globalized capitalism and intended the total absorption of the world that was produced, long before the digital age.
He quotes Dostoevsky and Walter Benjamin even more frequently, and Sloterdijk (2005) uses them in an article where he uses the idea of ​​Dostoevsky that he finds there the cult of Baal as a consumeristic and hedonistic symbol, where a doctrine of “purposes” as a dogma of consumption.
Sloterdijk makes a connection with Benjamin: “The power of the metaphor of Dostoyevsky’s crystal palace for the philosophy of history is best measured when juxtaposed to Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of the Parisian arcades. The comparison is suggestive because in one case as in the other an architectural form was proclaimed as the key to capitalismo, condition of the world “(SLOTERDIJK, 2005, p. 279).
It will be Byung Chull-Han who solves this duality by establishing that there is always a “mystery” that is unveiled and that this is part of the beautiful and the truth, which is gradually revealed.
It is necessary to think that only 4% of the universe is known, that of the call of baryonic matter, that composed of protons, electrons and neutrons, in addition to some subparticles, dark matter that in part is also baryonic and so-called dark energy, of repulsive action that permeates the entire space, are practically unknown.

SLOTERDIJK, P. Crystal Palace. Chapter 33 in Globalen Inneren Raum des Kapitals: Für eine philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung (In the Global Inner Space of Capital: For a Philosophical Theory of Globalization). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005, pg. 265-276.

VÁSQUEZ ROCCA, Adolfo, “Sloterdijk: Modelos de comunicación ocultoarcaicos y moderno-ilustrados. Para una época de ángeles vacíos. Nómadas. Revista Crítica de Ciencias Sociales y Jurídicas, 2010 Disp.: http://www.ucm.es/info/nomadas/26/avrocca.pdf, Acesso em: setembro de 2018.

 

 

The metaphor, the imaginary and the veiling

07 Sep

We have already posited that veiling is an essential part of truth and beauty, in Paul Ricoeur this is more clear in his “Living Metaphor” (1975), because part of his phenomenological hermeneutics is in essential relation to the work of art, in which he the passage from the archaeological moment of hermeneutics to the teleological, that is, the logic of the ends, beyond the propositional logic.
In the Greek mimesis, the artistic production and the new had meant as instruments that give meaning to reality, but it surpasses it and it can be said there was also something teleological.
This is entirely valid, for in reading the Living Metaphor one realizes that it is a rereading of Aristotle’s Poetics, but he himself clarifies the difference by exposing that the metaphor goes beyond (meta) and transposes (pher) into a thing that designates another object, while mimesis is the idea of ​​imitation.
But beyond the metaphor the important question in Ricoeur is that of the imagination, it must be separated from the virtual, the unpublished lectures of Paul Ricoeur in the United States, were documented and commented, this already a translation, by George H. Taylor, where the concept of “producing imagination” appears in four categories: utopian, epistemological, poetic and symbolic sacrum (Taylor, 2006), which seem to me to be more related to the virtual.
Aristotle himself states that this figure of speech (metonymy – substitution of the word, synecdoche – replaces the part for the whole, etc.) is tangent to those who wish to express questions in orality and must do so in writing.
Let us make a passage, using resources from the virtual, from the syntax (the structure of the sentence) to the meaning (its semantics) arriving at the logic of discourse (hermeneutics), this comes from a theory of the substitution of meaning (false semantics in many discourses) for a theory of meaning, a logic underlying the hermeneutic, no longer as dogmatic truth, but as dialogical truth.
The question of classification facing Enlightenment and encyclopedism will result in Gadamer’s question if there is no underlying metaphor throughout it, while Derrida asks whether there is no rationalist ability to classify all objects conceptually.
Byung-Chul Han responds non-dualistically, the truth and the beautiful are “veiled” and only that is able to see through this veil the desired “clearing” arrives, then the metaphor is a resource and dialogic hermeneutics a path, this path oscillates between the real and the virtual.
The virtual is thus the visible beyond the veil, and the real is the unveiled in the present, the representative, whose memory in the next moment is re-present or imaginary.

Chul Han also speaks of the use of metaphor in the Bible as a purposeful resource for “making them the object of desire”, I think it is more than this, that reaching the truth is done in steps and that much of life is still a mystery .

RICOEUR, P. La Métaphore Vive, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1975.
TAYLOR, G. H., Ricœur’s Philosophy of Imagination. Journal of French Philosophy, Vol. 16, p. 93, 2006; U. of Pittsburgh Legal Studies Research.

 
 

The veil and the truth

06 Sep

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han pronounces the sentence: “to be beautiful is fundamentally veiled” (Han, 2016, 40) and then to lean on Walter Benjamin who also sees “the critique of art as a hermeneutic of cover-up … does not have to to lift up the veil, but rather, what has to do is rise the true intuition of the beautiful, but only thanks to a very exact knowledge of the beautiful as veil, must rise to an intuition that will never reveal itself to this we call empathy … pure from the naive to the intuition of the beautiful as a secret “(Idem, 40).
But Chul Han goes further: “Beauty communicates neither to immediate empathy nor to naive observation. Both procedures try to lift the veil or look through it … “(idem), that is why although in all times there was always the cover-up, only now with the” immediate empathy” would say precipitate since Benjamin claims it, is that the beautiful it becomes more obscure and with the truth the same happens.
Chul Han goes to the text, and using St. Augustine states that “God purposely obscured the Holy Scriptures with metaphors, as a ‘picture frame’, to make them the object of desire … maximizes pleasure through the text and makes reading a loving act “(p. 41).
The reading, the text and the truths in our time, the objectivity tries through the cognoscent subject, plural use because for the ontology the truth is more than subject is Being and therefore, can only be unveiled in the relation of beings, however the subject of idealism “transcends” to arrive at the knowledge of the object, of which only has “perceptions”.
It is a primary sensitivism, it seems truth and unveiling, but it is pure speech, there is in fact the knowledge of the object as a thing, Husserl had already claimed that it was necessary to return the “things themselves”, that is, not to reify them, but to reveal them.
The truth of immediate empathy is little elaborated, it does not expect reflection, contemplation, it lives on an almost unhealthy impulsivity, sometimes unhealthy even though it soon becomes frustrated by the facts, it even denies the facts and it frightens.
It is not collective blindness, but a lack of collective dialogue, a lack of deeper empathy, less formal and less superficial relationships and ties, lacking in truth and beauty.
Han, B.C. The salvation of the beautiful. Lisboa: Relógio d’Água, 2016.

 

Truths, tautologies and beliefs

05 Sep

I was astonished that Noam Chomsky said: “people do not believe in facts anymore,” the crises (not unique, because there are political, ideological and even humanitarian crises) although all with an economic outline, the deep root of them is for a rejection of own culture.

Some will say identity, although it should not be left aside, the discourses I see in this line border on psychologism, the correct philosophical concept must be seen with the question of relation, while psychology sees as personality problems, behaviors and mental functions, then for me it’s something else. In the sociological case it has in the idea of ​​self-conception, aspects of social representation as a single person, or in quantitative terms what differs it from others in cultural, gender, nationality, now online identity or something that is formative of one’s own identity.

Although culture comes as a sociological aspect, it is reductive because culture is more comprehensive than aspects of identity and nationalities, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn have found at least 167 different definitions for the term “culture”, which shows the breadth of the term . We have a narrow definition, but incorporate essential elements: all that complex that includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, customs and all other habits and capacities acquired by man as a member of society ” Edward B. Tylor, for our theme as it involves knowledge, beliefs and truth.

Systems that ignore beliefs are not true, but tautological, even admitting an intersection between beliefs and knowledge, because they ignore that there is knowledge linked to beliefs (figure below).

Systems that admit that in every culture there are beliefs, can differentiate the knowledge present in different cultures and that have a core of distinct knowledge, but in both there may be truth, it is a dialogical and relational knowledge.

The art, morality, and customs that are within these cultures may have no relation to truth, but each has a different nucleus of knowledge (x and y in the figure) that relates to truth, facts and attitudes help to maintain this true relationships. 

 

The Schelermer triadric ballet

04 Sep

Many are the biographical possibilities for Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943), to understand Schelemmer’s humanism, beginning with his discipline “The Man” which he taught at the Bauhaus in “Teaching Matters: Man”, aiming to “familiarize apprentice with the whole man, making it from two distinct types of consideration: the visible trimming and its presentation “, as it appears in the site: www.tipografos.net/bauhaus/.
The idea of ​​the triadric bale comes from three participants (two male and one female), 12 dances and 18 costumes, there is strong puppet theater influence, the idea of ​​machinic movements, synthesis of his vision of modernity divided into two main movements : the mechanization, which makes man as a machine and the body a mechanism, and, the primordial impulses, the depths of our creative impulses.
He saw in the choreographic geometry of dance a synthesis, the Dionysian and emotional origins of dance, which made it rigid and apolytic in its final form, but wanted to be free from the historical baggage of opera and theater, and thus see the man transformed by the costume and dance.


He saw puppets and puppet movements as human beings, reading from the virtual would say that he has a “grammar”, and using a reasoning Schelemmer can be said that “the medium of all art is artificial”, and therefore , a virtual artifact.
In analyzing the body as geometry: it saw the head and eyes as circles, so the body becomes a figurine from which the costume derives, and finally, the movements of dance and music emerge from there, forming the “whole” of man where we began the analysis of his work.
Born on September 4, 1888, he would be 130 years old today, the reason he’s in Google.

 

Julia 1.0: A new computing language

03 Sep

When the scenario of computing lijaguajes no longer seemed to present novelties, an audacious project of MIT arises that can change this logic, it is the language Julia, it is unnecessary to say that it is open source.

At a London event in 2018, the JuliaCon for developers: Professor Alan Edelman, Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski and Viral Shah released Julia 1.0, Edelman declaimed at the time: “Julia has been revolutionizing scientific and technical computing since 2009,” worked since this year in a new language that combined Ruby, MatLab, C, Python, R and others besides having parallel features, artificial intelligence and easy connection with semi-structured databases. The commands are similar to the already popular C, C ++ and Java, for example, the program of calculation of the roots of the equation of the 2º. Degree:

function quadratic2 (a :: Float64, b :: Float64, c :: Float64)     

sqr_term = sqrt (b ^ 2-4a * c)    

  r1 = quadratic (a, sqr_term, b)    

  r2 = quadratic (a, -sqr -term, b)    

  # can return multiple values ​​without using the return word     ~

  r1, r2

end

 

The version released on August 7, 2018, and its stable version the next day called Julia 1.0 puts it definitively in the universe of the programming languages ​​of the present time.

The release candidate for Julia 1.0 (Julia 1.0.0-rc1) was released on August 7, 2018 and the final version one day later.

The team wrote that code that runs without warnings in Julia 0.7 will run identically on Julia 1.0. Julia uses JIT (MCJIT from LLVM) that generates native machine code directly, before a function is executed for the first time, are not bytecodes executed in a virtual machine (VM) or translated as the running bytecode, as copor example, Java, the JVM or Dalvik on Android, is even native code.

Julia is also used to drive standalone cars and 3-D printers as well as applications in precision medicine, augmented reality, genomic structures, machine learning and risk management.

As Professor Edelman said: “The release of Julia 1.0 indicates that Julia is ready to change the technical world by combining high-level productivity and ease of use of Python and R with the fast speed of C ++”, changes come there.