Arquivo para July, 2020
Symbolic and structural evil
17
Jul
It being clear that it is not a question of the struggle between good and evil, but
the absence of good or the banality of evil, there is then a night in the West that cannot be unveiled if we remain superficial or “frivolous” as some authors point out, good is fragile, but not frivolous.
To understand the problem of “symbolic evil” addressed by Paul Ricoeur, one must look at its bases in Husserl’s eidetic phenomenology and in Gabriel Marcel’s existentialist philosophy, his search is what gives meaning to freedom (the modern view of free will ) and the reciprocal relationship between human voluntary and involuntary experience, this is essential to understand symbolic evil.
The original appearance of the question of consciousness (of something) comes from the connection that Franz Brentano makes when he returns to the subcategory intentionality, which broke the Cartesian identification between conscience and self-awareness, where intentionality reveals itself to be turned towards the outside and is thus projected outwardly with objective guidelines ranging from perception and imagination to will, affectivity and the apprehension of values (empathy stands out).
What is voluntary and involuntary depends on this “great thesis”, while Husserl operated in conscience to the analysis of perception and “representative” acts, Ricoeur extended to the spheres of affection and will .
So what is voluntary is the alternation between the vibrant impulse of emotion and the point of view of habit, while the involuntary “absolute” (symbolic or structural) is under what he called character (not in the moral sense, but in the sense of “ feature”).
The point of support that he has in Gabriel Marcel’s existentialist philosophy, without abandoning “eidetic analysis” is the problem of a subject capable of distancing himself from desires and powers, owner of his (and thus voluntary) actions and servant of the needs of the unconscious, character, an area not revealed in real consciousness and in life, although it seems to be outside the powers of the concrete, the historical, or what he calls the occasion, is the empirical realm of the will, seen in three moments.
The first is the human decision resulting from a project for the world (what Heidegger will change to a world view), the action includes both the dimension of a project with others in the world, as well as personal or subjective, however it does not separate and calls them -the body, and the body is seen as both voluntary and involuntary, but there is a “consent”.
Thus Ricoeur shows the exaggerations of idealism, and makes the “habit” in such a way as to inhabit it and make it habitable, and what the author points out that man can fail (his work O fallible man, from the 60s) , and the constituted guilt and the conscience of it are expressed in the symbols of culture.
Affirms the importance of mythical language to treat this symbolic, as well as the parable of the chaff and the wheat (Mt 13,24-29), which states that the “good” seed of the wheat blooms with the chaff (which must later be discarded), there are three situations: the seed that grows, the one that is suffocated by the chaff (symbolism of evil) and the one that falls between stones and has no roots (Ricoeur’s character would be this).
Paul Ricoeur (1967). The symbolic of evil. Beacon Press (Original published in 1960).
The reason and the evil
16
Jul
To demonstrate two truths, Agostinho de Hipona wrote a few pages in his book
“On Free Will”, practically the whole book II (from chapters 3 to 17), where we concluded all the goods processed by God, including the free- agency, and the question is welcome must be given to man.
Both Augustine (De Trinitate) and Boethius (Opuscula) defend the cooperation between faith and reason, but it will be in the High Middle Ages that Tomás de Aquino and also Duns Scotto, in different variations (realist and nominalist) defender that the use of reason is complementary of faith.
While Tomás de Aquino defends a distinction between Being and essence, Scotus will elaborate a law of analogy, which states that we cannot conceive or that it is something that does not exist, as a thing that exists (is) that it is (qui est).
What is important in both Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotto is a complementarity between faith and reason, as an idea that Descartes, Kant, Leibniz and Hobbes are heirs of them being too simplistic, or that they will be replaced by cases of faith, by rational arguments , or fact that is important, must be studied from the ontological aspects.
Thus, the ontological argument was corrected by Franz Brentano, incorrectly called a neo-Thomist, as only one subcategory “went up” to “being” which is consciousness, a hermeneutics and the phenomenology that is taken up from it, and remains in Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer is an ontological philosophy, having in common a metaphysical question of Being.
Hanna Arendt and Paul Ricoeur, who come from these changes, return to the question of “evil”, but as questions of reason and all modern literature is analyzed (Descartes, Kant and Hegel).
The struggle of good against evil, weaknesses of good
15
Jul
The evil in Augustine of Hippo in book VII of the Confessions, is the absence of
good, just as the entire universe is ordered, although now we discover a universe with energy and dark mass, black holes, semi-new and galaxies disappearing and appearing, and many laws new in astrophysics, even so, there is a hierarchy, where some things stand out from others, and that is what Augustine drew attention to, and there was already in Augustine the question of free will.
But a tough lesson even for religious like Augustine, who abandoned the Manichean philosophy, is the struggle between good and evil, and this still dominates part of the philosophical dualism, where being inferior is not being evil, there are inferior good things and things more superiors, so the important thing is the loss of sense of what is good or bad, what Hanna Arendt called “The banality of evil” (Companhia das Letras, 1999), so someone can do something “inferior” without being “evil ”.
Those who want to give life pure delight, or who claim that it makes sense in a life well lived if we are “productive” and “active”, inspired by myths like a superior IQ or fortuitous inheritance, fortune in the Greek sense is different, even if this is done by oppressive means, where arguably the racial argument is the most disgusting of all, but where do these myths come from.
One of the great myths that has arisen since antiquity is Odyssey of Odyssey and Iliad (chants VIII of Odyssey and IX of Iliad), which means a symbol of man’s ability to overcome adversity, although there is the character Odysseus (the Greek name of Ulysses), would be born in Ithaca, son of King Laerte, who reigned in Anticléia.
Although James Joyce’s Ulysses, written from 1914 to 1921, speaks of a character Leopold Blum, considered by the author to be a modern man who is both strong and weak, cautious and rash, hero and coward, in an attempt to create a human being representative of humanity, however, is actually the modern lonely hero, an exquisite Don Quixote.
The contextualization of the Greek epic hero and the modern “hero” are, however, different, so to read Ulysses by Joyce it is necessary almost a script, which even some were made.
It was the psychologist Carl Yung who called attention to the “monologue” aspect of Joyce’s Ulysses, although he looks like an “ordinary” man, he is a single man and his “struggle”, warned Yung: “What is so scary about Ulysses it is the fact that, behind a thousand veils, nothing is hidden; of being neither turned to the mind nor to the world, but, as cold as the moon seen from the cosmic space, allows the drama of growth, being and decay to take its course ”, this is the modern myth.
The heroes who appeared in the pandemic are not heroes of “war” or immortal myths, they are not immune to the pandemic themselves and live with fear, and even family isolation, what they should think about is the life worth living. for everyone, for the planet and for health.
JUNG, Carl Gustav. Ulysses: A Monologue, UK: Haskel House, 1977.
The Question of Evil in History
14
Jul
A hermeneutic philosopher Jan Patocka, is quoted by Ricoeur, although it is
not directly linked to evil, it can give a Socratic origin to the question of the question of evil: “The loss of ‘sense’ is not the fall in ‘nonsense’, but access to the quality of meaning implied in the search itself. Jan Patocka thus rediscovers the Socratic theme of ‘soul care’ and ‘examined life’ “(Ricoeur, 1999, p. 16), is in the preface to Jan Patocka’s book “ Heretical Essay on the History of Philosophy”
Plato elaborated the Sumo well, which in fact is the elaboration of an ethics, the Good and Beautiful must be sought by the moral subject to harmonize internally, and be aware of the Good, in that sense that the care of the soul can be thought of and Socrates’ examined life.
Aristotle elaborates his famous Nicomachean Ethics, where he explores the idea of the search for virtue, so the natural man is not good, it is through the practice of virtues that he becomes good, but both in Plato and in Aristotle this virtue has a social meaning , although it is confused with morals, it is not.
The sense of moral evil, in the sense of vices of the soul, is elaborated in Augustine of Hippo, in book VII entitled “The idea of God and the Origin of evil”, evil is disorderly agape (different from the philosophy of eros and filia), so it is in the absence of the choice of higher things to choose the lower ones (this is the deepest sense of agape), that we adhere to vices, and disharmonize.
Although the theme can be found in several medieval authors, such as Tomás de Aquino and Duns Scotto, the sense of evil is deepened in the theistic sense and the philosophical is linked to Plato’s Ethics, remaining the idea of virtue, worked around the Ethics of Aristotle, wrote Thomas Aquinas: “Virtue designates a certain perfection of potency”, (Summa Theológica, 1st section, 2nd part, q. 55 a.1).
In modern times, it is Paul Ricoeur who takes up the issue in his book “The symbolic of evil”, but it is in the delicate passage from the Renaissance to Modernity that the distance between moral and ethical evil is deepened and confused, as if they were the same, leaving the virtue of being thought out.
RICOEUR, P. Prefácio a PATOCKA, J. – Essais hérétiques sur la philosophie de l’histoire. Trad. Erika Abrams, Lagrasse: Verdier, 1999.
A pandemic with many outbreaks
13
Jul
Although the large centers, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro States in particular, registered
declines in the number of infected and deaths, the pandemic has internalized and now reaches the innermost part of the country, which includes small poor cities, indigenous villages and regions with little access. Restroom.
The general graph (of deads) shows a stabilization around 1200 daily deaths, but it does not mean the control of the disease, nor any indication of a fall, since the expansion into the interior and deprived areas can cause new explosions, allied to an innacute opens of trades without criteria.
We present the general graph above just to indicate a general graph, since the policy under the responsibility of the regional governments and mayors (it was determined by the STF) does not allow us to say that there is a national policy of combat, although the regional health secretariats communicate and governments make state laws, such as the one that obliges the use of masks, with some regional control.
Another controversial issue is the use of medications, hydroxycloquine, the initial controversy, and now azithromycin, ivermectin and nitazoxanide are not recommended by medical criteria, the drugs in the background are given on a case-by-case basis, for example, for infectious conditions, depressive symptoms or respiratory problems that are acute, but each patient may or may not have conditions that prevent the use of a certain medication.
At the international level, some measures on economic weakness are beginning to be considered, such as helping the unemployed, how to articulate joint action plans between countries, the great example of which is the euro zone.
Preventive measures must continue for a long time, which I prefer to call social distance, because flexibility is already growing and little controllable, wearing masks, maintaining a certain distance in transport, walking even considering that they are done in airy areas are necessary and are part of of the so-called new normality, it is enough to see the countries left the peak.
At the social level, measures to prevent the worsening of the social crisis should be considered in the world.
Looking without seeing, listening without understanding
10
Jul
The rush, the hectic life, the anxiety made us insensitive on a daily basis, on
the social plane the stubborn reigns, where the third party has no time, follows the logic of Truth and False, which is valid for the world of digital equipment, but it shouldn’t be in the logic of human thought.
The third included by Barsarab and Stefan Lupascu, is also in the quantum principles and is gradually reaching digital physical devices (now quantum), and some advanced teleportation experiments have been carried out (see the article), which expands the concept to space , one can go from A to B, without going through the third intermediary, which introduces the discontinuity.
But the social, human and political logic remains binary, Manichean and gradually leads to a confrontation at a time when social forces should unite for the common enemy that is the virus and the consequences that it will bring socially, we remember that the Spanish flu followed both wars, despite countless warnings from wise thinkers and philosophers, to mystics.
As Morin says (see the lecture) it seems that we are walking like somnambulists in the dark, the process that could correspond to global solidarity is going the other way around, we want to include but exclude, we love only equals, knowledge has become obscure.
The biblical words follow, as it is in Isaiah (6: 9): “You will hear, without understanding, you will look, without seeing … because the heart of this people has become desensitized”, and even in times of world difficulties it seems that folly endures.
Evangelist Matthew says of his time, but it also serves for the present moment (Mt 13: 16-17) “Happy are you, because your eyes see and your ears hear. Truly I tell you, many prophets and the righteous wished to see what you see, and did not see, wished to hear what you hear, and did not hear ”, but you can still open your ears and change the route.
It is a time of deeper awareness for those who want change, and to listen more attentively to the signs of the times for those who believe and know the kingdom of God on earth will come.
The veiling of knowledge, night of thought ’
09
Jul
Arrábida’s Charter of Transdisciplinarity, written by the physicist Nicolescu Barsarabi,
the Portuguese serigraphist Lima de Freitas and Edgar Morin, points out the process (prior to the Web), where excessive specialization and an impoverishment of Being created a veiling of thought, says the letter :
“… The contemporary rupture between an increasingly accumulative knowledge and an increasingly impoverished inner being leads to the rise of a new obscurantism, whose consequences on the individual and social level are incalculable.” (Arrábida, Portugal, 1994).
The problem then is how to create a knowledge that unites and a worldview that expands the impoverished and brutish human spirit, according to Morin’s own recipe: “it is necessary to replace a thought that isolates and separates with a thought that distinguishes and unites”.
All polarization and barriers between different thoughts are the root where dialogue is ignored, even if sometimes stated, the semantic closure of thought, whatever the principles and often moral, religious and even cultural are important, must exceed the pre-conceptions (in sense of Gadamer) and meet the positive in the Other.
The Letter of Arrábida says in article 14: “The opening involves the acceptance of ignorance, the unexpected and the unpredictable. Tolerance is the recognition of the right to ideas and truths contrary to ours ”, this is the meaning of replacing a thought“ that isolates and separates ”with another that“ distinguishes and unites ”, having a difference does not mean isolating or even separating.
It is the totalitarian idea of the single truth, even if religious, pragmatic or scientific, that often isolates and does not unite, in grounded dialogues there are always new elements to be considered and rarely are they properly heard and respected.
Physicist Barsarab Nicolescu, one of the signatories to the Arrábida Charter, in his own Charter of Transdisciplinarity, regarding quantum physics wrote: “… where does this blindness come from? Where does this perpetual desire to do the new with the old come from? The irreducible novelty of quantum vision continues to belong to a small elite of leading scientists ”, although the physical reality proves and surprises it.
Barsarab said in that his Manifest about “reality”, “In our century, Husserl and some other researchers, in an effort to question the foundations of science, discovered the existence of different levels of perception of Reality by the observing subject”, more than that the observer is part of the experiment, of the whole, and is not neutral.
All of our logic and actions are based on three axioms: The axiom of identity: A is A, The axiom of non-contradiction: A is not non-A; and the third is called the axiom of the excluded third: there is no third term T (T for “included third”) that is both A and non-A.
What Nicolescu says is what would happen if we became the included third, that’s what Stefan Lupascu (1900-1988) did when creating the logic of the included third (tertium non datur), including the T-state that is neither “current” nor “potential”, they replace the classic logic of “true” or “false”, and create a more generalized level that includes physics, epistemology and what is “consciousness”.
NICOLESCU, Barsarab. Transdisciplinarity and Complexity : Levels of Reality as Source of Indeterminacy. Available in: https://ciret-transdisciplinarity.org/bulletin/b15c4.php access: July 2020.
Tribute to Edgar Morin, 99 years old
08
Jul
July 8, 2020 Edgar Morin turns 99 years, with an impressive lucidity, recently
described the current pandemic as: “We have to learn to accept them and live with them, while our civilization has installed in us the need for certainties each time bigger about the future, often illusory, sometimes frivolous ”, the same frivolity that Peter Sloterdijk states:“ In this frivolous sphere, we thought we were able to control nature with sophisticated technology, but the virus brought us to our knees. Will our way of being in the world change?”.
Of Sephardic Jewish origin (Jews who settled in the Iberian peninsula), with the original name of Edgar Nahoum, was born on July 8, 1921 in Paris, his father Vidal Nahoum was a merchant from Salonica (the former Thessalonica), and his mother Luna Beressi, passed away when she was 10 years old, adopted the code name Morin during the French resistance struggle and remained.
In 1978 she married Edwige Lannegrace, to whom she dedicated the book Edwige, the Inseparable (2009), after her death in 2008, about him, she said a sentence by Montaigne: “It was him, it was me”.
He is currently married to the 61-year-old Moroccan sociologist Sabah Abouessalam.
He wrote 1956, Le Cinéma or l´Homme Imaginaire, Minuit, Paris. In Portuguese: Cinema or the Imaginary Man. Lisbon: Relógio d’Água Editores, 1997, had previously written Year Zero of Germany (1946) and Man and Death (1951).
Among other books, the second book of great impact is The Lost Paradigm – for a new Anthropology, Zahar, Brazil, 1979. (French edition of 1973).
But his great work will be the six volumes of Method 1, the first “The nature of nature” publishing in 1977, the second of Method 2, “The life of life” (1980), Method 3 “The knowledge of knowledge” ( 1986), Method 4 “Ideas: habitat, life, customs and organization” (1991), Method 5 – humanity of humanity: human identity (2001) and Method 6: Ethics (2004), the years adopted are from the original French editions.
In total he published more than 30 books, in 1983 he held a debate in Lisbon where he put “The epistemological problem of complexity” which became a book in 1985 published by the publisher Europa América Portuguese.
His central ideas in addition to the problem of complexity are the return to the human (which is called the lost paradigm), the transdisciplinary thought present in almost all of his work and was a signatory of the Letter of Transdisciplinarity of Arrábida by the serigraphist painter Lima de Freitas, for him, the physicist Nicolescu Barsarabi, written in 15 synthetic articles, where we highlight:
“ … singly accumulative knowledge and an increasingly impoverished inner being leads to the rise of new obscurantism, whose consequences on the individual and social level are incalculable.” (Arrábida, Portugal, 1994).
In 1985 he wrote “The epistemological problem of complexity” (Europa America, 1985), which was conceived from a debate held in Lisbon, in December 1983.
The essence of his thinking about complexity can be thought of in three new concepts, among them: the dialogical operator (understood differently from the dialectic operator), the recursive operator (which means to understand the consequences of the acts, in a continuous cause-effect relationship because the effect produces a new cause) and the holographic operator (the part is in the whole and the whole is in the part, so do not separate the part from the whole).
So we must unite separate things, namely: reason and emotion, sensitive and intelligible, real and imaginary, reason and myths, and, science and art, another essential thing is to consider that we are 100% nature and 100% culture, the old nature paradigm X culture that philosophy asks about what we are, from contractualists, through evolutionists to socio-Marxists (wrote My left), Morin answers in a new way (from Pena-Veiga: The ecological awakening: Edgar Morin and ecology complex).
He has many questions about our future, the following lecture explains this dramatic moment, that the pandemic can demonstrate that this is how we should perceive it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3t7UFTpDHE
Knowledge needed for the future
07
Jul
It was Edgar Morin who found the masterful way or veil over knowledge, its
errors and illusions, to interrupt knowledge in its principles, which is expanded in another book that talks about “global flavors and local flavors: the transdisciplinary look” (2008) .
“The seven knowledge necessary for the education of the future” (Morin, 1999) affirms this paradox that in search of knowledge embedded in illusions and errors, it affirms in the first chapter, while no second presents a gap that knowledge teaches is “not pertinent” to the student, that is, the fact that he shows within a disciplinary process that should be displayed as a whole.
The third saber is to indicate human identity, to comment on the part is curious and to speak so much about identity without mentioning the social complex in which we live as a “species” that must identify as such (from identity), perhaps the great paradigm of humanism , today in question.
This will send in chapter 4, which is the earthly identity, which lies in the importance of understanding that the disciplines (areas of specialties) must converge to a human condition, and it leads to human understanding, once in school it should be used as “ understand each other ”.
The fifth saber refers to dealing with uncertainties, students can consider a great paradox when dealing with mysteries, since a school school only dedicates to dealing with conceptual and scientific certainties, and life is always a surprise.
The sixth (and 6th. Saber) chapter involves understanding, which comes from the earthly condition, the globalization process that started with the colonization of America in the 16th century and had complex consequences (ideological, economic, social, etc.) and this must be taking us to a planetary condition.
The seventh chapter involves the ethics of mankind, he names it as an anthropo-ethics (Sloterdijk goes further and says an anthropotechnique is necessary, but falls outside this scope), the importance of citizenship in society (in Homeland-Earth goes beyond and proposes citizenship planetary) where a social conscience is needed.
Tomorrow he will be 99 years old and we are thinking of a special post for this lucid educator and thinker.
MORIN, E. (1999) Seven complex lessons in education for the future. UNESCO Pub. Available PDF.
http://www.ideassonline.org/public/pdf/Sevencomplexlessonsineducation.pdf
The pandemic plateau remains
06
Jul
The data observed in the last week of deaths by the corona virus, which are reliable
data, since the curve of infected people depends on testing, which is done by companies and is still low, indicate that the plateau remains and the pandemic is internalized in the Brazil (see graph), we have already stressed the importance of making the logarithm to better visualize the slope of the curve, which is exponential.
What the policy would be for this moment is to continue maintaining social isolation, personal hygiene, and social distancing habits, in addition to precautions in relation to municipal policies.
Any prospect of a peak, at least the data indicates, seems meaningless, the number of infections remains around a thousand daily deaths, and a #lockdown is no longer viable, as the virus has already spread and regional isolation does not mean pandemic control.
We will navigate through uncertainties, already tired of a long period of isolation and with an open and close policy that does not have much effective results, except to contain a greater contagion, without meaning any effective result of controlling the pandemic at the federation level.
The economic costs that would be great in the case of a #lockdown period, will now be higher because both the commerce and the services that effectively need face-to-face contact would not be justified to keep them disabled, and few services are non-essential.
The plan is to continue the so-called “social isolation”, whose more certain name in the Brazilian case we have already said, is “social distance” which is compatible with some open services.
The essential is therefore to maintain personal care and hope that the curve falls “naturally”.
