Arquivo para February, 2020
Powers and the Other
28
Feb
There is something beyond the will to power, yes there is a non-being, which does
not depersonalize or imply a loss of identity, but in dialogue with the Other, with the one who is not my mirror.
The affirmation, the empowerment of people and groups in logical closings of identity, are neither original in the sense of preserving the dialogue with cultural traditions, nor are they in fact power because it implies submitting the Other that is one to some identity that is not his.
Thus, the true ontological identity, contrary to the logic that is individualistic or closed in groups, we often criticize the individualism of the Other because we do not admit its original identity (that which comes from races, cultures and traditions) and ultimately we do not admit the your Being, and to admit it you need a non-Being, that is, to see the Other as he is.
The powers in modernity have grown because of the impositions that the laws of the State, the rules of conduct and what has historically been called “Contract” which is nothing but making the right to conscience something that is subject to the rules and laws of the State. It is not about anarchy, rules of social coexistence that existed since the primitive man who was already known originally lived in groups: in caves, nomads or established in territories.
What leads to violence is to always submit the Other to our own will, our cultures, looking at the Other as less, less cultured, less “evolved” or another justification for not understanding and respecting different cultures, beliefs and ethnicities, so violence arrives.
The cult of the State, Hegel went so far as to say that it was eternal and it is not, many have changed throughout history from the Greek City-State to modern democratic societies, now in a new turmoil.
The biblical passage that the “devil” offers Jesus earthly powers and he rejects is this (Mark 4: 8-10): “again the devil took Jesus to a very high mountain. He showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and said to him, “I would give you all this, if you kneel before me, to worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Go away, Satan, because it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and you will worship Him alone´”.
Coronavirus, euthanasia, media and power
27
Feb
We have already pointed out the power of new media, the concept of psychopower
was also explored by Byung Chull Han, we wrote a post about it, but now we are back to biopower.
As Foucault thought, biopower has two distinct forms: one called anatomical-politic of the body and another of population biopolitics, the first are disciplinary devices responsible for extracting the productive body from the human body, by controlling time and space, within institutions (see how many do this, including educational ones) and the second way is to regulate populations by making birth rates, migration flows, epidemics and increasing longevity useless.
See discussions of the corona virus, migrations in Europe and longevity problems in the social security of the elderly, but now the perverse case of “assisted death” that avoids spending on the elderly and allows them to die “assisted”, of course the electric chair also has assistance , but it is for criminals, at least supposedly, because there are mistakes.
The coronavirus threatens to get out of control and the power controllers are frightened, they might think a few, perhaps most of them poor, will die, but that is not the case, it affects everyone, in Iran even a deputy health minister is sick, and several events are threatened, some have already been canceled and tests for the Olympics are already threatened and may even be canceled.
Biopower, therefore, is out of control and power itself can suffer from it, stock markets fall, economies collapse, tourism and travel fall, in short, biopower also has limits, but both it and psychopolitics are still mostly in the state control.
Social networks, and not always their media form networks, these can lead new powers and empowerment of groups, cultures and ethnicities that are under the tutelage of the States.
The supper of ashes
26
Feb
That defines how or man is by nature also understands or is a nature, or a
substance proposed in an infinite number. and an initial structure in the philosophy of Nature and in the 1584 work (*Supper of Ashes) of Giordano Bruno, linked to Copernican theory, which creates an infinite universe with an omnipresent divider, an eternal matter and a permanent mutation.
Bruno declared himself a “realist” Copernican in 1582 in Paris, and when he arrived in London a year later, he placed himself on a non-cosmological level with extravagant ideals for the time, epoch or universe in which he lived and at the time of his living rooms. class. they are suspended, dedicated both to the theological radicalism of its Protestant public and to “atheistic” Aristotelianism.
A curious aspect of Bruno, like Leibniz and Spinoza or produced, is named his protagonist of Theophilus present in the Bible and what is meant by “son of God”, or that he too will separate himself from his Catholic religion or thought that Philosophy should to be independent of religion, through the passage through the Copernican heliocentrism through an infinite universe that we owe to Bruno.
According to his policy and / or being able to involve this infinite movement, he stated: “What ingenuity to ask to burn, to be able to move or to be able”, that was or its package with the donations of the power of religion and the nascent academy.
In his book “The supper of ashes” he made an extraordinary statement for the time: “The earth and the stars … how they dispense life and food from things, restoring all material that entrepreneurship, are themselves endowed with life, to a much greater extent, and to be alive, and in a voluntary, orderly and natural way, the second intrinsic principle, that they will move towards the Spanish and Spanish spaces with which I agree ”, he said, a universe of Copernicus.
t is important not to be true of Bruno, who also has controversial works on the Eucharist and the Virgin Mary, more or more important for our time and restoring a lost dialogue of old data, and for which the inquisitors continue. apostates Giordano Bruno took a big step in science and wanted a philosophy to be independent because of power and religious not inculturation, even if it leafs through and needs to overcoming fundamentalism and establish the Dialogue.
*Bruno, G. (1995) The Ash Wednesday Supper. Lawrence s. Lerner ¨Edward A. Gosselin (editors), University of Toronto Press.
Digital influencer, the power in new media.
25
Feb
Digital influencer is a new area of expertise in the media, since the first bloggers
they exist, they talk about curious things from serious topics, to cooking, fitness, sports or anything that is on the rise at a given moment, those that are successful mean a lot in in terms of statistics and funding, but little in terms of serious and political content.
I quote from a Brazilian Felipe Neto, around 32 years old, I didn’t go check it out, I just read it somewhere, sometimes he’s smart, sometimes comedian and ironic, he talks about everything, especially unpublished cultural facts, like the Passos Family that formed a “ trupe ”that won with a carnival satire marchinha (*primary sing of carnival) “The fault is of the PT (left party)” on CBN radio won the marchinhas contest.
They say he has millions of followers; I didn’t check it out and there are also “robots” and “influencers” capable of producing values, but the visualizations are really astronomical. You must be unaware of Christian Figueiredo, who is around 21 and has already launched a book “Eu sou loko” (I´m crazy) and has already done marketing for Colacoca (or other) and Disney, and if it goes to a mall it will drive teenagers crazy, ask your son, nephew or grandson who he is , 50% chance that they will know.
The Santa Catarina´s Luba, Lucas Feurschütte. he is around 25 years old, and has already made a successful video with Christian Figueredo asking: “Are you a gay”, there is a third party that I don’t know who participates, but maybe he’s also successful, his success is Luba TVGames ( around 230 thousand followers), I will not exhaust the list, I just point out an unknown universe of those over 30 years old, at least the vast majority, young people are under their enormous influence.
If your son is a teenager, pay attention to these names: Júlio Cocielo, who got involved in a controversy for making a racist comment about the player Mbappé, oh this you know, another name is Luccas Neto, 25 million subscribers and billions of views,
The third in Brazil is Kéfera Buchmann do 5inco Minutos channel, I don’t know how ironic it is with the American program 60 minutes, but it talks about beauty, sketches, parodies and has a very fine humor and 11 million followers, Whindersson Nunes, who once in a lecture I played with him and all teenagers reacted, and the adult who would say the conversation did not understand anything, and of course, Felipe Neto.
From other countries all I know is youtuber PewDiePie, a Swedish comedian around 30 years old, I discovered that his name is Feliz Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, and also those from Instagram, but there are “common” media names like Cristiano Ronaldo and Messi players. soccer, Beyoncé and Selena Gomez singers, Justin Bieber singer and others, personally I am a follower of friends and family.
It’s all I know, I dedicate myself little to these conversations, but the desire for power made me go after what young people are concerned about, in 3 or 4 years they will be in college and I don’t want to miss the joke, or the conversation, or the “ power ”that people of our age lost to young people.
Oh, it’s all media people, yes, but the new media philosophers (its comm
Will to or power
24
Feb
A little-known concept of Nietzsche is the will to power, as a “natural” driving
force of man, in fact this led people to expand from the primitive world, the wars and empires of Alexander the Great, of which Aristotle was the tutor and then the Roman Empire, and the empires of modernity: Portuguese, French, Russian and American.
There are other great empires little mentioned in history: the great Manchu Qing dynasty of northern China invaded and defeated the Ming dynasty, was a minority ethnic group but dominated the whole of China and even had a brief restoration in 1917 and the great Mongol Empire was one of the largest in area, reaching Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries.
But power also refers to the individual’s desire for influence and power, today it is digital influencers, who are even financed and receive respect and credibility and many of them are unknown to the mainstream media, for example, the American PewDiePie is the youtuber with greater number of followers, we will return to the subject.
One can think of potency as an act and potency, so power would be the objective reached by potency, but Nietzsche himself warns that its meaning is different: “the will to power is neither a being nor a becoming, it is a pathos”, thus it must be analyzed in the triad ethos, pathos and logos.
Pathos is, therefore, that sense also used by Descartes, although Nietzsche denies reason as a principle, where the idea of pathology comes from, which moves in imperfection.
Thus, one can think of the will to power (in the sense of Nietzsche) in three concepts, the cosmogonic, the historical or the psychological, each one establishes a special relationship with the diverse proposals present in modern society, the cosmogonic using Nietzsche’s terminology is a original law, without exception, that comes from the very reality of things.
Thus, its historical law is never deterministic nor has anything hidden, “… this Dionysian world of eternally-creating-myself-of, eternally-destroying-myself, without target, without will. .. ”, said in a fragment written in 1885, means that a set of forces that act in a diffuse way results in a state of eternal return, and therefore without an end.
Thus the will to be can also be understood as the insatiable desire to be more than what one is, if seen without an end, one can understand the psychological aspect more clearly.
It may seem distant from modern thought, but just look at reality and it will be realized that outside historical determinism, religious fundamentalism, the remaining proposal seems to be this, but Nietzsche himself can help us organize this, if it is possible to think something out of this state of “eternal return” that the will to power created.
An incomplete ontology: the affirmation of Being
21
Feb
The Wheel of Fortune is chance because the logic of laissez faire, chance brought to
the economy, is also the logic of the affirmation of Being, in the classic sense; Being is and Non-Being is not, there is no becoming.
Non-Being is also Being, the affirmation, the will to Power, takes with it the logic of war, dualism, Manichaeism and its destiny is war, the difficulty of understanding the Other, the dialogue made as a form of hypocrisy , because in the end, it is the negation of the Other and the affirmation of Being, in the logic “we have the truth”, even if it is said in a religious way, it is its negation.
The impossibility of coexistence, from where physical violence arises, even psychological and moral violence, the unconscious desire to demoralize and undermine the Other, which is in this non-Being logic, and thus the moment that passes is lived in a false way, as fleeting and with the sense of maximum affirmation of the Being.
It seems crazy to say that non-Being is also, but it is precisely in its exercise that we deny war, we deny conflict as necessary, we make dualism become sincere dialogue and we can enter the logic of the Other and discover a complement of Being, while not-Being.
To affirm that the Non-Being is destroys the logic of power, exclusion, conflict, because it allows the Other to exist, denies psychopolitics because there is no need for the “psychic” oppression of the Other, to affirm the Same, the mirror, even which exercised collectively, is a selfish knot and tied exclusively to its own power and pleasure.
So say contemporary speeches about philosophy, which fill audiences and praise philosophers and eloquent religious: “you came to win, assert yourself, say you are the best”, etc.
The complete ontology is also opposed to religious fundamentalism and the Pharisaic, because it is also exercised as a non-Being, says the evangelist Mateus on the Master’s teaching to his disciples (Mt 5.38): “You have heard what has been said (yet the it is in our day): I look for another and tooth for tooth !, But I say to you: “do not face that it is evil” On the contrary, if someone slaps you on the right face, it also offers you the left! ”, here it is the “hidden” logic of non-Being.
Joy or happiness, gaudio and euphoria
20
Feb
Joy and happiness are not the same thing, although one can lead to the other
and vice versa, joy is a feeling of satisfaction, of completeness or even fullness in its extreme, what I call gaudio, while happiness is the greatest good desired by the human being, so stated Aristotle, and although it may have nuances of values it is the best definition.
In this sense, happiness is to live the moment well, even media and mystical philosophers agree, but the “virtuous” effort that makes conquest one of these moments, but it is clear that each one of this virtuous path can be lived with greatness and effort.
That struggle for which every moment can be lived with dignity and even joy, but the joy and true happiness is conquered with effort, virtuous exercise of a dignified path, while euphoria can be won in a fleeting moment, the joy and true happiness do not.
Joy is therefore an exercise beyond the obstacle and everyday problems, happiness is the possible achievement after a long journey in which reaching the summit depends on the last and decisive steps, often without breath and without clarity that the summit can be reached.
The Greeks said that “eudemonia” (“good”-eu from “spirit”-daimon) was conquered by arete, which can be seen both as “virtue” (the repeated practice of the virtuos, the virtual) as “excellence”.
It is also not fortune, in the Greek sense of the word it is not just money, but chance or luck, the goddess Fortuna became an iconographic image from the illuminations of medieval manuscripts to the stained glass windows of the churches (photo *), it was like that a luck cast at random, but it would be determined predestined.
Joy is joy when achieved by small daily efforts and it is not fleeting, while euphoria is not only escapes but can become deep sadness or even depression, for elaborate speeches living the moment that is wise, can be lived with joy or euphoria.
* The blindfolded goddess Fortuna, called the “wheel of Fortuna” was painted by Tadeuz Kuntze in 1754, oil on canvas in National Museum of Warsaw.
Between fantasy and imaginary
19
Feb
The imaginary is part of popular culture and tradition, countless cultures express 
themselves, seem myths and fantasies were from reality, but it differs from this in having an original source, that is, being part of a culture and expression of desires and perspectives cultural aspects of a people.
What Droysen, Heidegger and Gadamer speculated about romantic historicism, which Dilthey elaborated, is nothing but fantasy historicism, the future as a pure unrealizable dream while the future to come is part of the cultural tradition and that is why dialogue with tradition is necessary.
Fantasy is initially an attempt to escape, the absence of dialogue not in the prosaic sense of listening to the Other, of accepting difference, but of truly understanding and dialoguing by entering into the concepts and perspectives present in tradition, without understanding it, we listen and not the dialogue, the dialogue that Martin Buber, Paulo Freire and even Bakhtin spoke about.
The fantasies represent delusions of the soul, uncontrollable compulsive desires, and which often reach pathologies, it is not a childish fantasy of fairy tales or superheroes, these belong to the imaginary because the child still sees the future world as a possibility. The epic imaginary, both as historicism and as literature, highlights the deeds and glories, where the present appears as a result of a mythical past, but which is projected into the future, expresses the factual exaltation of memorable or extraordinary events.
The romantic imaginary is that of a lonely hero displaced in time, Don Quixote is a good expression of this imaginary, it represents a reaction to the philosophical saturation of determinism and rationalism, but he is stuck with the empirical sensory or the metaphors of the real.
These fantasies in general appeal to creativity, but say little about reality
Happiness and idealism, between subjects and objects
18
Feb
The development of idealistic thinking, the strongest and most profound of
modernity, gave man a sense of dominance not only over nature, but also over his own possibilities and the reach of his will.
So the exploitation of natural resources, now with signs of exhaustion, also the exploitation of peoples and labor forces made human undertakings take off and now intending to conquer planets and the universe, but we discovered the human limits: desires, powers and wars.
The first and the main one is the finitude of life, even the oldest cultures always elaborated some eschatology about the previous and future life of humanity, modernity meanwhile tried to exploit its finitude to the fullest, what counts is the maximum happiness in short life for all of us, exploring it to the fullest is enough.
But idealism pointed out limits, if it is an unfinished project or if we have already plunged into another project, late modernity or postmodernity does not matter, the essence of this project was finitude, and what was called enlightenment, happiness, will and freedom it showed not only finitude, but also the monstrous aspects of this conception: absence of imagination (the subjectivity said of this way of thinking), the human and natural unbalance of forces, and the absence of peace.
The idealistic building built a society full of objectivity, of wonderful constructions, from the reach of the productive forces almost until their exhaustion, but war and cultural, religious and mainly ideological hatred, a fundamental part of this building.
Separating the human into two pieces, to later search him, subjectivity and objectivity, was nothing but a monumental building that disregarded the human essential: the absence of forms of happiness that contemplate everyone and the search for solidary means of power.
It is not that God died, but that we killed him, if there is no divine bond between men, he can never exist transcendently, in fact, idealistic transcendence is nothing other than the separation between subject and objects, unified by this fallacy of objectivity.
Without recovering real dreams, real happiness, and the social means for this, we sleepwalk in the dark, as stated by Edgar Morin.
The importance of Droysen’s legacy
17
Feb
We stated last week that both the perspective of Droysen’s Hellenism (he coined the term) and the perspective of the true meaning of his story were broader,
long before Gadamer’s criticisms of “romantic” historicism, this author who was a student of Hegel , had already done so and with much property because in addition to being a student, he entered the concept that Hegel is for modern philosophy its founder.
Johann Gustav Droysen (1808-1884) questioned the principle of historicity, and, long before his time, questioned historians about the “scientific” foundations of a certain perspective and relativism, as well as indirectly questioning Dilthey in an attempt to use history to support the Sciences of the Spirit.
Droysen in his Compendium on History (Grundriss der Historik) that was not suitable for History, since it pretends to be science, to borrow without a method from another perspective of knowledge, which is natural science, even if as an “example”.
The solution presented by him, similar to that of Gadamer, synthesized in the methodological notion of Investigative Understanding (forschendes Verstehen), aimed to give History the possibility of an autonomous science, so for him there is something that precedes the explanation x understanding dualism, which is the history, what we called last week the “form” of thinking.
His 1857/1858 compendium of history (Grundiss der Historik) is available in Spanish (1983) and Italian (1989) versions, still in Portuguese.
Of particular interest, at least for me, was Chapter 3, which deals with the hermeneutical problem of understanding, which gives a sense of the applicability of its method.
The link that we can and should make with the moral question, from the previous topic, can be found on page 386 of her work Teologia dela Storia (Italian translation):
“… we need a Kant, who critically examines not the historical matter, but the theoretical and practical movement before and within history, and who demonstrates, like anything similar to the moral law, an imperative category of history, the living source from which the historical life of humanity flows. ”(DROYSEN, 1966, p. 386)
Droysen observes in what he calls “Systematics” three types of ethical communities: “the natural communities”, “the ideal communities” and “the practical communities” (figure above), and relates to them from history, said thus: “ours systematic resulted from the notion that the historical world is the ethical world, but while conceived from a certain point of view; because the ethical world can be considered under other points of view … ”(Droysen, 1994, p. 413).
Its becoming, therefore, is far from the Hegelian dialectic, but at the same time it dialogues with it.
DROYSEN, J. G. (1966) Teologia dela Storia. Prefazione ala Storia dell´Ellenismo II – 1843. In: Istorica. Lezioni sula Encilopedia e Metodologia dela storia. Trad.: I. Milano – Napoli: Emery.
_______. (1994) Istorica. Lezioni di enciclopédia e metodologia dela storia. Trad. Silvia Caianiello. Napoli: Guida.
