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Arquivo para December, 2020

Excess or Eucharistic

16 Dec

Access In Spheres I, the author Peter Sloterdijk will suddenly reveal when he is talking about “thinking the inner space”, that his initial inspiration is due to Gaston Bachelard “who, with his phenomenology of material imagination and, especially for his studies of psychoanalysis of the elements, brought us a treasure trove of luminous insights to which it is always necessary to return ”(page 91).

It makes a surprising revelation, I reaffirm its keen religious sense even though it states the opposite, stating that due to Bachelard “every man, by the simple fact of looking inward, becomes a Jonah or, more exactly, a whale and a prophet together in one person” (page 91), and indicates that he will follow these indispensable intuitions.

Such is the end of this introduction where it states: “the fundamental risk of all intimacy … destroyer comes closer to us than the ally” (p. 92) but if it were the other way around. It connects the cardiac issue to the eucharistic excess, it will explore the idea of ​​the heart by initially linking it to two Japanese expressions that have more complete cosmogonies: kokoro (heart, soul, spirit, sense) and hara (belly and center of the body), citing the work of Guido Rappe.

Then the Western culture returns, taking the writing Herzmaere from the poet Conrado de Wüzburg that was produced in the 1260s, and the account of confessor Raimundo de Padua of Catarina de Siena, who is in Vida dos Santos, where a mysterious exchange of the mystical took place with the heart of Christ (above painting by Giovanni di Paolo), he will also comment later on the writing De amore by Marcílio Ficino on Plato’s Banquet from 1649.

The medieval tale of Würzburg is the recurring exchange of hearts, the author mentions only in the Decameron there are two passages, but it is in the analysis of Catarina de Siena that there are vital points.

He will say that it is not possible for the human to level himself with the divine except for its absolute annulment, and this is “the situation of mystical exception, however, the metaphysical cleavage between the poles is leveled out.” (page 103). It will state that it is “pure subjectivity reaches the hot zone of the subject being totally dematerialized, not represented” (page 103), follows the reasoning until saying that it is “hysteria”.

For the philosopher, the mystic’s desire was, from the beginning, not so much to welcome “the Other in itself as to plunge herself into the aura of the Other” (page 106), here I transform excess into access, for Christianity there is no excess, and it’s  there the divine to submit to being “devoured” in the Eucharist by the creature, and thus give him access to the inaccessible: the transubstantiated divine, in an anti-aortic reaction.

His saga penetrates even more in the Christian mystique, especially the Catholic one, when speaking of the wounds of San Francisco, the exhumation of the body of Felipe Neri, that would have found a hand-wide flaw, and this when having access (or excess as the author wants) the Eucharist: “when receiving the host, edema of the mouth and cheeks that gave the impression that he was gagged.” (page 115).

This reading is important in the Christmas period, because the author himself affirms that since the beginning the church has been embarrassed “in the face of the embarrassment of having to correctly determine the proportion in which the entry of God into the realm of human beings” (page 126 ) because this is exactly an excess (as the author wants) that gives access (who does not believe).

 

Sloterdijk spheres

15 Dec

Volumes I, II and III of the Spheres of Peter Sloterdijk are digressions on the human spheres that include thought, culture and religion (although he says no to consider he wrote Post-God and makes several allusions to religious issues, such as “matris in grêmio ”and “eucharistic excess ”).

What Spheres in fact is for the author of anthropotechnical studies, can be read as: “life is a matter of form, this is the thesis that we associate with the venerable expression” sphere “, of philosophers and geometers.” (Sloterdijk, p. 14)

However, these “spheres” go beyond form, it is a metaphysical form, which in its representation serves as the moonlight for the protection of humanity, which is placed in bubbles of stones, weapons, poetry and ideas, but it lacks immunity, written before pandemic, launched co-immunity.

His spherology intends to answer, in addition to Heidegger’s dasein, being-there-in-the-world, as what we mean when we say we are in the world from the reception in the mother’s arms after the expulsion from the uterus, until the construction of civilization after the expulsion of Eden, of course is a metaphor.

With the death (or night of God for religious), the great protective sphere of humanist civilization lost its local character and extended to the infinite, the protective relationships of the intimate were dissolved in formal gray relationships, so now it is what happens in this absolute exteriority?

It is necessary to speculate then on how to survive and protect oneself, an animal in need that no longer has a habitat to venture into the eccentricity of ex-sistens (being out), it is also the question of address, inhabiting a community of care, this is the co -immunity.

Even before the pandemic, Sloterdijk’s reasoning revealed what it is to care and co-exist, without these concepts the pandemic will pass and we will return to frivolity, as the thinker says.

Sloterdijk, P. (2016) Esferas I, trad. José Oscar de Almeida Marques, BR-São Paulo: Estação Memória editors.

 

 

Emergency use of the vaccine

14 Dec

Amid the growing controversy of the vaccine, as vaccination approaches, some clarifications are needed, meeting on November 10 the collegiate body of the Brazilian National Health Surveillance Agency (ANVISA), in which it is highlighted that it is destined to a “group previously defined”.

Still according to this agency, no laboratory had requested, until that moment, the use of vaccines, even though the agency has already defined the requirements for the request for “temporary” use.

What is considered temporary and emergency use is foreseen to face the pandemic.

A document entitled “National Plan for the Operationalization of Vaccination” against covid-19 was delivered Saturday (12/12) to Brazilian Minister Ricardo Lewandovski, rapporteur of actions that speak of the mandatory vaccination, by the Union’s attorney general José Levi, according to the Brazilian National Agency .

The 93-page document is divided into ten axes, specifying the target population, the vaccines already acquired and those still in the research phase, the operationalization of the vaccination, the logistical scheme and the communication strategies for a national campaign.

The vaccines that are under acquisition by the government, according to the official document, are Fiocruz / AstraZeneca, 100.4 million doses in July 2020 and then another 30 million doses per month in the second half, Covax Facility 42, 5 million doses and Pfizer under negotiation.

There is no date for the beginning of the vaccination, while the number of cases is growing, the hospitals are getting crowded again, and the control of bars and restaurants seems inefficient during the Christmas season when the business is busy.

 

 

Advent, but what will happen?

11 Dec

This is the question that takes on different shapes in the Christmas season, there will be a new normality, the world leaders are going for a “big reset” (word used in the world forum), but it seems that the central concern is the economy, even though they speak of “New Green Agreement” or the calls of socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for a new balance.

Apparently, they are not aware of a deeper crisis, of thought and culture, even being able to say a great night of “God”, religion synonymous with lack of common sense and social separatism, although the religious leaders themselves say seek the opposite.

Those who are concerned with the failure of humanism, with a civilizing collapse would only be apocalyptic, so the analyzes that we are walking as “sleepwalkers in the dark” (Edgar Morin), which “is not a proper time for thought” (Peter Sloterdijk ) and that we live in the hell of the equal (Byung Chul Han), there are many thinkers who see this crisis.

It is a picture with no apparent solution, where ideological cries are reborn and the tendencies for a change different from what has been thought until today is almost unnoticed, as Albert Einstein’s famous phrase says: “madness is wanting different results, doing everything exactly the same”.

Who are the prophets and oracles of this time who would announce great changes? what proportions will they have? will nature itself rebel with its imbalance? are times for a new earth and a new sky?

Socrates announced the period of ancient Greece that preceded modern society, the coming of Jesus was preceded by the last and greatest of the prophets John the Baptist, who are they today?

The Gospel of John 1,22-23, after several questions from the Pharisees to John the Baptist, he replied: “Then they asked: ‘Who are you, anyway? We have to take an answer to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?’  João declared: ‘I am the voice that cries in the desert: Flatten the way of the Lord ’ ” – as the prophet Isaiah said.

For those who have sense, it is time to smooth the paths for those who have no carelessness

 

The crisis of Nature and aorgic transform

10 Dec

The apparent death of thought was developed by Peter Sloterdijk, it is also in his other writings If Europe awakened, The critique of cynical reason and the 3 volumes of the Spheres, however a root pointed out there is not fully developed the relationship with nature, its “Aorgic”.

Rousseau had already debated with the atheistic Illuminists saying that what is most insulting “is not thinking (the Divinity) but thinking wrong about it”, he elaborated his famous speech on the profession of faith of the Savoyard vicar in which he expresses their religious conceptions.

However, the important thing is his thought about nature “a will moves the universe and animates nature”, since Aristotle’s relationship with man is to see her as submissive to the human will such is the anthropocentric paradox, because Nature is beyond and it precedes man, who is part of it and not its absolute master, although as Teilhard Chardin says it is its maximum complexity.

This complexity of nature is developed by Edgar Morin, in his Method I which is the Nature of Nature, but the place of man in nature (the title of one of Chardin’s books) is still incognito and we now know that if we do not obey it, it perishes and we also as a consequence, that is why anthropocentrism is a paradox, we are codependents and co-participants of Nature, and it shows signs of agony, also the skeptic Harari sees this, and many experts.

What will be the reaction of nature, it could happen due to a strong event that changes the whole planet, the so-called aortic reaction, the inorganic over the organic, the earth would totally change and some mystics created an image of this new earth (above), which I call of “newgea”, in reference to the great mutation of the earth by successive earthquakes in pangea, there would be a chain reaction.

We must remember Energy sources such as nuclear plants, the tsunami followed by the tsunami in Japan (march 2011) showed that nuclear plants are a problem, deactivating them is not possible.

Harari, speaking of Homo Deus, his second successful book, believes that man would do this, religious (some of course), mystics and visionaries know that an aorgic event can occur.

 

 

 

Apparent death of thought

09 Dec

If there is a sphere beyond pure anthropology and Darwinian scientism, it is not only in religious thought, but also in thought that goes beyond human, this thought, although in crisis, is present in contemporary philosophy.

Peter Sloterdijk wrote The apparent death of thinking: about philosophy and science as a life of exercises, his general theme about contemporary society as “a life of exercises”. The book is the result of several lectures given in 2009 called “unseld” lectures, at the Scientiarum Forum of the University of the Tübingen whose theme was “Anthropology in the discussions of science”, and the author proposes two forms of anthropotechnics, the short-range (You have to change your route) and a long-range one called Selbstverbesserung (yes enhancement).

There is a reinterpretation of Kant and Cassirer due to an ontological excess, which compensates for the “biological deficit”, I explain better, the being who seeks to transcend a deficient biological reality, in such a way that his general “exercise of life” new problems, philosophical and scientific theories. Seeing that the exposition and practices in the usual history of ideas made possible the existence of an improbable science and philosophy, he elaborates a genealogy of the “homo theoretician”, the “pure observer”.

I t analyzes the conditions that arise in the West, the theoretical attitude in general, and science in particular, where he sees what he will call “the murder of an apparent dead” (p. 14), will expand the Husserlian notion of epoché, put in brackets all exteriority and judgment, and expands this concept.

The proposed genealogical method capable of re-elaborating the origin of the product of the sciences, implies what Nietzsche adopted as an attitude of suspicion: “Does the theoretical homo really come from a cradle as high as it is guaranteed from the first days? Or is it better a bastard who wants to impress with fake titles? “(p.57), the provocation has an earlier path already taken.

Ira e Tempo (2006) (Wrath and Time), refers to the product of failure in the space of the polis), psychological (for a psychic disposition to distance oneself from the environment), sociological (through a pedagogy of training the individual) and half-theoretical (the result of a written culture that predisposes the distance of a text, which in turn keeps the distance of the time of life.

This whole framework and to say that we are facing extremely difficult dilemmas for man, for thought and for the civilizing process itself, is beyond and below the pandemic, the outbreak of the real in Marx and the neo-Hegelians, Nietzschean perspectivism, consciousness class in Lukács, Heidegger’s trajectory, the ethical revolution in the natural sciences after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the existentialist commitment, knowledge in Scheler, Kuhn and Foucault, the demystification of isolation in scientific research by Latour and CTS (Science, technology and Society) (pp. 121-129).

Sloterdijk, Peter (2013). Muerte aparente en el pensar. Sobre la filosofía y la ciencia como ejercicio. Siruela. Barcelona.

 

Human-only eschatology

08 Dec

Two misconceptions about Christmas are that it is only the birth of Jesus, at least the historical Jesus must be admitted as a man who exists because there was a census when he was born, the second is what came and what will come, the advent is like that that (or that) that comes and will come.

Rereading the work Homo sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari presents a Darwinian evolutionary perspective showing how man imposed his life on the planet, contemplating three phases: the collector, the agricultural (and sedentary), the industrial and the modern phase of information intensive, and search align the structural elements that connect with the cultural order and its foundations.

In terms of its culture, the general beliefs shared in each phase, which he calls fictional myths, to which he attributes the indispensable social cohesion and the undertakings of each period.

Even though he is a Jew, who has a strong abramic eschatology, he refuses the existence of the soul, conscience and individuality, considering that science has not detected this, and that the remarkable achievements of contemporary science dispense with these existences.

His long and elaborate work which, in denying these metaphysical existential facts, takes the same path as the neologicists, of algorithms that would regulate even biological life, but consciousness is something so disconnected from intelligence and is that organisms are just algorithms.

The classic sense of the cosmos, explored since Plato, the energy required to trigger an algorithm of creation, the energy without which the very idea of ​​an algorithm cannot be sustained, is something that already pre-existed before the hominization of the cosmos (nature became himself) and what will be the future of this process about which Harari himself asks, without soul and awareness of this end.

These questions point to an eschatology, beginning and end, and we do not have a bet on a distant or near end if we do not have answers on a principle, the eschatological logic of Being.

Although Harari’s eschatology is not complete, there is no transcendence, he realizes that we are close to a very dangerous civilizing threshold, both in the human aspect and in the balance of nature, and that man will be able to accomplish this task alone without something superior.

 

 

 

Vaccination and options

07 Dec

The UK starts its mass vaccination on Tuesday, which will be 40 million vaccines for 20 million people, due to the need for two doses of the Pfizer vaccine.

The effectiveness is around 95% and the side effects in about 2% of the volunteers are headaches and fatigue, similar to a strong hangover, however there will be other vaccine options.

Differently in Brazil, the options are small and the effectiveness of the vaccine, despite all the political propaganda surrounding the federal government’s AstraZeneca / Oxford vaccine and the São Paulo government’s Coronavac, both are much less efficient and have popular distrust.

State and municipal health secretaries published on Saturday (5/12) on the website of the Brazilian National Council of Health Secretaries (Conass) a request that the federal government acquire all vaccines against Covid-19 with proven efficacy and safety, economic interests / politicians must unfortunately prevail and we will be left with few options.

What leads us to distrust political and economic interests is the disregard for efficiency.

Two reasons are important in terms of efficiency (it is different from effectiveness), the first is that which mobilizes the natural system we have (the majority representatives are macrophages) and that develops a defense independent of the infectious agent, the second and second if the system is not enough (see su-efficient root) it mobilizes the adaptive or acquired immune system, which is more sophisticated and dependent on the type of bacteria or virus, this system must “generate” defenses (the most representative are the lymphocytes).

What proves that this is true is that all the agencies say that there is no guarantee of the end of the pandemic, and we must remain taking care of protection, time will tell and it will not cost more lives.

 

 

Possible pax

05 Dec

It is not social, political or ethical peace that is always in conflict, although there are integrative movements and a worldwide tendency towards global citizenship, living in the village (with communications is global) and feeling a citizen of the world.
The next generation will be able to accomplish this, the “mature” generation now has setbacks in reading the present, and this has caused fear and distrust by breaking feelings of respect and otherness.
The measures of force are discouraging and reprocessing of the social process, moving towards autocracies and arbitrariness, they are never democratic.
The pax roman was submission to the central power of Rome, the peace of Westphalia was a treaty of religious tolerance among Christians and eternal peace the idealistic dream in the power of the modern state.
Possible peace is tolerance of differences and acceptance of human limits in times of crisis, depends on some dose of the spiritual.

 

Deserts and the oracles

04 Dec

We walk like somnambulists in the dark, points out Edgar Morin, this is not a favorable time for thinking, says Peter Sloterdijk, Byung Chul Han says that our time is the “desert or hell of the same”, but I would say that the desert can still be fertile, and having an Oasis, however sterile, is mass, depersonalizing and more than authoritarian, it identifies us to nothing.

These are some of the voices that I identify as a desperate search for a return not to the old normal, but to a really new normal, it must not be this at the end of the pandemic, but the hell that leveled us all below, for the inhuman, the irrational and cynicism.

Edgar Morin points to education as a path to this renewal, but who will be teachers with new thinking and new mentality, Byung Chul Han points to the care of the land, his new book “Praise of the Earth” that points to a community garden, where the rhythms and characteristics of each flower are registered and received with their oriental attention, centered on the simple elements of each flower.

Peter Sloterdijk had already written if Europe Awakened, we could say now if the world woke up in the post-pandemic, if we really looked at the Moral Good that Morin proposes, for a concrete and truly universal fraternity offered by Father Francisco in his encyclical Fratelli Tutti but I think they are voices that cry out in the desert like John the Baptist who died beheaded by the request of a sensual dancer who had enchanted Herod.

When the Pharisees went to John the Baptist, who lived in the wilderness, wearing camel skins and eating bee honey and cereals, he replied (John 1:23): “I am the voice of the one who cries out in the wilderness, ‘Make a straight path to the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said.”

When there are oracles, thinkers, and scholars who speak in the wilderness a change is near.