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Arquivo para November, 2021

Form and act

16 Nov

Information is a strong word at this time in history, however the concept of form of in-form seems to be separate from the concept of matter, hylé for the Greeks.

Modern philosophy has separated form from content, as well as separating a label from the ingredient in a bottle, but this comes from the reduced understanding of what matter is, the hyle of the Greeks, whose thinking in Aristotelian terminology interconnects them in hylemorphism ( ὕλη, hýle = “matter”; μορφή, morphé = “form”) and in-formation is that.  

For this to have an anthropological reach, necessary for the discourse of cultural diversity, it is necessary to link act and potency, as Thomas Aquinas did, where matter is not what we call today (as substance, for example), but what it is as a possibility or in potentiality, written like this by Thomas: “matéria est id quod est in potentia” (matter is what is in potentiality) (THOMÁS, ST I q.3 a.2 c).

Thus the act is the actual existence, or the acting itself, that is, “forma est actus (form is act) (ST I q.50, a.2, obi.3).

Thus, the articulation of the binomials potency x act and matter x form in this way, “matter is nothing but potency, since form is what something is for, as it is the act” (TOMÁS, ScG II, c.43), these categories they give a distinction from fundamental metaphysics, and anthropologically they mean that one thing is the possibility of existing or acting: potency or matter, something else is actually existing or acting: act or form.

Some modern theologies want to separate body and soul, that is, without eschatological and biblical foundation, otherwise the human figure of Jesus would be divided into two: the divine and the human, which would be in opposition and fight against each other, and that is why the Christian anthropology must be strictly unitary, as it is in Thomas Aquinas.

The existence of a body in the human condition is the union between power and act, between matter and form (seen in this new aspect linked to content and essence), without its actual existence (form) the body would not even exist , but only the possibility of existing (potentially) makes it exist in act, this unity is radical, since the necessary condition for its existence is the body. this is fundamental to understand the Christian anthropology written clearly by Thomas: “The human being is not just soul, but something composed of soul and body” (THOMÁS, ST I q. 75 to 4c), if on the one hand all materialism (which is not hylemorphism) denies the existence of the soul, a lot of bad theology seeks to deny the existence of the body, it is the modern dualistic relationship, crystallized in objectivity and subjectivity, in which both are mutilated.

According to Thomas Aquinas, human living bodies and actual existence (form, also called by him the intellective soul) is immortal, unlike other non-human living bodies, whose existence has a beginning and an end, not an eschatological end, but the finalist end of an interruption, for all humans die, and for him death is explained as a temporary deficiency through which we pass into immortal existence and overcome the radical deficiency of the living body through death.

Put more clearly: “That the soul remains after the body, this happens because of a deficiency of the body [per defectum corporis] which is death.

THOMAS AQUINAS. Theological Summa São Paulo: Loyola, 2001-2006. 8 v.

 

The pandemic is not over

15 Nov

It is sad and distressing, but the pandemic is not over, Europe is very concerned about covid-19 and in Brazil, where the numbers have not yet dropped from 260 deaths a day, and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation of Brazil (Fiocruz) registered a increase in children in cases of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) with records higher than Covid 19.

While cases are on the rise in countries like Germany, Russia, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, Russia set a new record for infection and deaths last week (It has only 34% of the population vaccinated), concern is growing over the arrival winter, and in Austria the government decreed a lockdown for unvaccinated people.

In Russia the measure taken was a national recess from October 30th to November 7, in Germany the director of virology at the Charite hospital in Berlin emphasized: “We have a real emergency now” as the country has registered almost 40,000 cases of covid , the biggest since the beginning of the pandemic, and made an alarming prediction, 100,000 people could die.

In Brazil, although moving at a slower pace than in the previous period of vaccine vaccination, the number is increasing and in many places there is a demand for people who did not come for the second dose. close to 59% of the Brazilian population is fully immunized and almost 80% have already received the first dose.

Seven Brazilian States are on the rise after a sharp fall in the previous month: Santa Catarina, Pará, Roraima, Rondônia, Bahia, Ceará and Piauí, a case that drew attention was Serrana (Brazil), where the São Paulo government carried out a mass vaccination trying to make the model city for vaccination, there were 563 cases in the last month and such a high number (the city has 45,644 inhabitants) did not have a clear explanation (see photo, official data from the municipal health Departament).

The end of the year parties are approaching and the concern is with the surveillance that does not exist in public spaces (concerts, shopping malls, supermarkets, etc.) and a flare-up of the disease would not only bring a worsening of health, but would extend the social crisis that is already affecting unbearable levels, there are no measures around this aggravation, the rise in prices is there.

Another worrying factor is now the psychological health of the population subjected to high stress and constant pressure of concern about the disease without clear policies, it is already possible to observe a large number of people with changes: anguish, tension, depression and antisocial attitudes, overcoming the crisis will require a lot of public efforts.

It is easy to observe in the markets and in daily consumption an increase in alcoholism and use of medicines, the end of the year parties could improve this aspect, but the social crisis does not help, the parties should be modest or in non-Christmas parties where the exaggeration and Drinks allow you to tap into the energies contained in the pandemic.

 

 

Distances in light years events in millions of years

12 Nov

If on a scale of human life we speak at most hundreds of years, on a planetary scale we must speak of millions and even billions of years, if in terms of distance we can speak of thousands of kilometers on a planetary scale, in astronomical terms this scale is millions of light years, the time light travels per year.

This is not even to say that extraordinary events do not happen, because in terms of planetary and universal life billions of years have passed, so at some point in time this could happen, like the end of the dinosaurs, the ice age and changes in the planet’s geology that have already occurred, and neither that it will occur tomorrow or in the next few years, but at some point in time they may occur.

The volcano on the island of La Palma shows signs that it may be ending its eruption, so the catastrophes that were suggested (hypothetically and with a rare possibility of occurring) will not happen, but it doesn’t mean that others elsewhere on the planet cannot happen, earthquakes and weather events have occurred and caused tragedies such as Fukushima in Japan in March 2011.

This pandemic also seems to be at the end of its cycle, although Europe is alert, but there more than here the number of people who have resisted the vaccine is very large.

We must always be alert, life on the planet is at risk, the problem of environmental balance, the social problem arising from the pandemic crisis, but which was huge before it, the eternal danger of wars over market disputes and religious intolerance is always hanging around us.

A great international agreement that unites peoples and establishes a truce in conflicts, that brings solidarity between peoples and resolves the ecological balance, could be a great encouragement for a civilization in crisis.

In spiritual terms it means that humanity must also evolve at this point, and the signs are not the best, so it is not a matter of apocalypse or threat, when the human spirit releases all energy contrary to its well-being and progress moves towards an abyss and towards tragedies, the day when a great night will fall on men seems to be at hand, so says the Bible reading (Mk 13:24-15): “In those days, after the great tribulation, the sun will be darkened and the light it will no longer shine, the stars will begin to fall from heaven and the forces of heaven will be shaken”, but the reading immediately afterwards also indicates (Mk 13:32): “no one knows about that day and hour, not even the angels of heaven , nor the Son, but only the Father”.

So let’s live life and let’s favor what is good for all humanity, not just for groups or ideologies, life needs to go on and it is necessary to fight for it.

 

The evolution of stars and white dwarfs

11 Nov

The evolution of a star like the Sun goes from a giant to a supergiant phase and ejects a planetary nebula and then transforms into a white dwarf when it is losing its energy and brightness.

The basis of stellar evolution calculations is called Hydrostatic Equilibrium whereby the pressure of the gas counteracts gravity in most of the lives of stars, since if there is no such dynamic equilibrium or time it collapses, so stars have nuclear reactions at some stage in their evolution, the ones that don’t have are brown dwarfs.

Using the ALMA radio observatory in Chile, which study a dozen red giants, the evolutionary stage at which stars approach death, they release an enormous amount of energy, producing a constant stellar wind, ie, ejecting a stream. of particles that throws the mass of the star itself in all directions, and these are the bases of its spectacular images.

If they were solitary nebulae, they would only have concentric shapes, but the presence of other companion stars and even planets that orbit the red giants, the influence of their fields ends up forming other images, influenced by the surrounding objects, giving specific configurations and colors.

One of the project scientists Carl Gottlieb, co-author of the study “(Sub)stellar companions shape the winds of stars evolved” said: “We now have an unprecedented view of how stars like our Sun will evolve during the last stages of its evolution”, this is of course on a scale of millions and even billions of years.

Palaeontologist and theologian Teilhard Chardin said that on the scale of the Cosmos: “only the fantastic has the condition to be true, planetary nebulae form incredible cosmic images that look more like divine paintings and are formed around a star that has reached the giant stage red, and recently scientists discovered why their shapes are unique.

 

But what are black holes ?

10 Nov

Black holes are regions in space-time (neither space nor time are absolute as idealists think) where the gravitational field is so intense that nothing we know, no particle or electromagnetic radiation like light, can escape it, Einstein’s theory of general relativity foresaw this as calculating an extremely compact mass that would deform spacetime to form a black hole.

On April 10, 2019, a gigantic black hole was “photographed” (figure), nestled in the heart of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy located 55 million light years away was photographed as a dark circle surrounded by a flaming ring.

This photo actually used a computational algorithm, as scientists can’t directly observe with the telescopes they use to detect other bodies using X-ray, light or other forms of electromagnetic radiation, but can infer by detecting interference in bodies next to matter nearby, so if a black hole passes through a cloud of interstellar matter, it will draw the matter inward in a process known as accretion, it first heats up and then is torn apart as it goes towards it, thus having a dramatic interference in the bodies in its vicinity firing powerful bursts of gamma rays.

Black hole formation is so far known as a result of stellar collisions, shortly after launch in December 2004, NASA’s Swift telescope observed powerful flashes of light that were gamma-ray bursts, and shortly after the Chandra event and the Telescope NASA’s Hubble Spacer collected “afterglow” data from this event which led scientists to conclude that powerful explosions occur when a black hole and a neutron star collide, producing another black hole.

Even though the basic process of formation of black holes is known, a mystery remains that they exist on radically different scales, spread across the universe, on the one hand there are many remnants of massive star explosions, they are generally 10 to 24 times larger in “stellar mass” than the Sun, others are small and difficult to detect, but scientists estimate that there are ten million to one billion of these holes in the Milky Way alone.

At the other extreme are “supermassive” black holes that are millions to billions of times more massive than the Sun, astronomers believe they may be at the center of all large galaxies, including our Milky Way, observation is possible from the effects in the stars and in the gases close to it.

 

Planets, ExoPlanets, Brown Dwarfs and stars

09 Nov

Planets as we know them are celestial bodies that revolve around a gravitational field composed of at least one sun (there may be more than one), while the exoplanet orbits a star that is not a sun, until September 21, 2021, 4841 exoplanets were known in 3578 systems, with 796 systems having more than one planet.

A star is generally more than 80x the mass of Jupiter, however there are smaller and less bright stars as they get older, they have a mass 13 to 80 times that of Jupiter, and astronomers have already found about 2,000 in our galaxy, the Milky Way.

In general brown dwarfs are new, however it was recently discovered, by chance like most astronomical discoveries, a body called WISEA J153429.75-104303.3, with more than 13 million years, as it was fortuitous its discovery was nicknamed “The accident”.

Age is interesting because it can tell us something about the origin of the universe, or the origin of this universe in case there is a multiverse, but due to its age it will give many clues.

A brown dwarf is a body larger than any planet, but too small and too cold to be a star, this is because the dwarf does not have enough mass to fuse hydrogen in its core, and thus release stellar energy, with age it gets colder.

The brown dwarf has different characteristics than the others, it doesn’t even have the faintest glow (see below for a detection image), and this intrigued scientists, said Davy Kirkpatrick: “This object defied all our expectations”, one of the co-authors of the discovery Published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Two other surprising facts about the “Accident” is that it is about 53 light years away from the Sun, almost neighbor to the Solar System, and it travels through the galaxy very fast, at about 207.4 k/s, or , 25% faster than any other brown dwarf.

The mysterious universe makes us not only think about the origin and destiny of everything that exists, but also its originality and beauty that emanates from something superior to us.

 

 

Because Covid 19 is not over

08 Nov

Last Thursday (11/04) Hans Kluge, WHO director for Europe, said 53 countries in the region are facing “a real threat of the resurgence of COVID-19” and encouraged governments in the region to take urgent action, in China the government even advised the population to stock up on food, the new wave is due to the delta variant.

In Germany, 66.5% of the population is fully vaccinated, but according to the RKI (Robert Rock Institute, responsible for the control of infectious diseases), there are more than 3 million people over 60 years old who have not been vaccinated and The risk is high, and last Friday it registered just 37,000 infections, a record number, while Russia registered 40,735 new cases and 1192 deaths related to the virus last Friday, according to the government’s own data.

France, Holland, Italy and England record high infections, Portugal has a high despite having the highest vaccination rate in the world (almost 90%) and only Spain did not have high infections.

In China, the outbreak, which is still small in number, affected several regions of the country, and the government even advised the population to stock up on food.

Brazil has 58.2% of the population fully vaccinated, while 76.3% have already taken at least one dose, the safety margin is still small for a general release that has already taken place, there is no more temperature control and agglomerations. worryingly, the country is still in the range of 300 daily deaths, and over 11,000 infections.

Vaccination continues, the country received this Sunday 1.1 million doses of vaccine against Covid 19 at Viracopos airport, despite some currents criticizing the quality of the vaccine, there are no scientific criteria for this criticism.

The ministry said the number by the weekend was 122.3 million people immunized, and the target population is 177 million people.

The additional dose for elderly groups, the so-called “third dose” reached 8.9 million additional doses, according to the Ministry of Health.

Looking at the European scenario, it is good not to relax and we must continue the full vaccination schedule, only one dose does not guarantee immunity, even in the case of Janssen, a booster dose is being applied.

 

 

Peace and related concepts

05 Nov

Peace is desired, but rarely cultivated, whenever a certain worldview or a worldview in the deepest philosophical sense is to prevail, in fact a conflict is brewing where divergent points cannot find a common horizon.

The Roman eternal pax was the submission of territories to the Roman Empire, the Westphalian peace (1648) was a political agreement so that the conflicting Christian worldviews (Roman and Lutheran) did not provoke wars between the monarchic kingdoms at the time, but it was the treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) that decreed peace between France and Spain, the final stage of the conflict and for this reason it is also part of the peace of Westphalia.

This treaty was an embryonic notion for the concept of eternal peace, coming from idealism, which was deepened in the Congress of Vienna (1815) and the Treaty of Versailles (1919).

The concept of Eternal Peace was developed by Immanuel Kant, as one of the ideals of the French Revolution, the state of world peace actually created the concept of a single “republic”, capable of representing the naturally peaceful aspirations of peoples and individuals, this concept in addition to being neocolonized (and thus incorporating concepts from the pax Romana), it is based on a Western cosmovision and does not encompass the concepts of the Arab and Eastern world, in addition to ignoring the concepts of the original peoples.

Peace in a broader worldview implies accepting the different visions of the relationship with nature and with other peoples, says Caio Fernando de Abreu in Small epiphanies: “we demand the eternal of the perishable, madmen”, because only in a model of a broad worldview that encompasses peace we could walk towards a new human and natural reality.

In a correspondence exchanged between Freud and Einstein, entitled “Why War?” in 1933 and which was banned by the Third Reich, in Freud’s text the question of interiority, because many who speak of peace want and provoke war, insist on their cosmovisions and they want to submit the others, so they do not pose the question of anteriority, which consists in understanding, considering war as an almost universal and trans-historical concept, but which originates in human interiority: ambition and power.

The Freudian reading, also Lacan will do this later, is to inscribe peace in an inverse way from the Kantian perspective, approaching the question of the infinite, and it also escapes any form of moral consideration, the psychoanalytic reflection is the possibility of power continuing to be confront, to develop a new approach to the “political” thing.

There is a question of the common good, also but not only, a second reading of the letters of Freud and Einstein, it is added “because the choice of war”, as well as the previous existence of war itself, phenomenon, process or fact that it is not possible to eradicate or replace, it can become a search looking at human ambition less or more clearly announced, discovering the nature, essence and reason for being, it is therefore an ontological question of “choice” of war and not of peace, often difficult to find, but which should be a primary desire.

 

FREUD, S. (1995) “Pourquoi la guerre? Lettre d’Einstein à Freud”, in OCP, v.XIX. Paris: PUF.

 

 

The cry of the afflicted

04 Nov

In many moments of personal difficulties, world conflicts and natural tragedies, there is always an apparent cry of despair and pain, but our time is a silent cry for those who lose their reason for living, the pandemic has also caused many anguish, loneliness and despair.

The famous pcitura Norwegian Edvard Munch’s The scream represents an androgynous figure in a moment of deep anguish and despair, with the Oslo fjord at sunset in the background, characterizes well what affliction means in our time, in addition to misery and lack of solidarity , the anguish and anxiety of the figure may be the author’s own, the phrase written at the top of the painting: “it could only have been painted by a madman”, analyzed by the Oslo National Museum concluded that it was the author’s.

The aspect of anxiety would remain veiled, were it not for this analysis, since the author stated on one occasion: “I have suffered a deep feeling of anxiety that I have tried to express in my art”, and this reflects our contemporary fears.

GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder) is one of the symptoms of this condition, which can also be bipolar or some other type of lack of control, this type was generically called Neurotic Anxiety, but there are two others: Realistic and Moral.

Realistic anxiety refers to the fear of something existing in the outside world, so a pandemic or a natural catastrophe (hurricane, earthquakes, sudden changes in climate, etc.) is basically a kind of fear of something real happening but that puts us in a different adrenaline.

Moral is the one that refers to the feeling of guilt, which triggers a fear of being punished, and this leads to a situation of conflict in the interior, so the person loses sensitive aspects of their interior: the unconscious threatening to enter the conscious what it means in practice a loss of self-control.

But the afflicted are also the helpless, the abandoned and the rejected by society, the various types of prejudices on which current controversies are born.

In the Christian reading, the text of Matthew (5:4) although some translations put as “afflicted”, the translation we prefer here: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted!”, because beyond the aspect of “sickness “there is structural evil and social evil that push many people into this state, and blaming them just means adding to any kind of “affliction” the neurotic anxiety that is born of a disproportionate sense of guilt, and this is the great kind of current social pressure.

But what would be the comfort the bible speaks of, the comfort of those who believe is that the only evil they should fear is the soul, so contrary to what many moralistic interpretations say, it is a balanced morality and without the exaggeration of guilt that it leads to an inner state without this kind of anxiety.

 

 

 

Injustice and arrogance

03 Nov

Those who practice injustices need to deviate life from its natural course, they need to change humanism to turn it into something perverse, it is necessary to influence the culture, remove from it what is beautiful and pleasant, disrespect the poor and helpless and confuse the soul with desires for power and greed.

Few men seek to deviate from these traps, with this the idea that a “successful” person means they were lucky, blessed or fought a lot dominates common sense, but they ignore people and perverse structures that favor them, and perhaps the majority of them is the power structure, that is why it is a source of polarization.

Throughout history, only the winners told their glories, “to the Winner the potatoes” says the character Quincas Borba (picture) in Machado de Assis’ novel, where he develops the idea of ​​humanitas, which sees war as a way of selecting the fittest, thus it justifies the oppression and impoverishment of the wronged.

The character Quincas Borba is a kind of atheist philosopher, who became rich when he inherited the property of an old uncle, a resident of Barbacena, State of Minas Gerais, where he spent some time in this city before dying.

The one who will enjoy the fortune left by Quincas Borba will be Rubião, a modest inhabitant of the interior of Minas Gerais, who receives his fortune and decides to live in Rio de Janeiro. who go in search of work, but of the rich who go in search of a good life.

Rubião goes to the city and will try to apply the philosophy of Humanitas developed by Quincas Borba and this is actually the theme of the book.

In addition to the literary and historical aspect of the novel, characteristic of the time (the novel Quincas Borba was first published in 1891), Rubião, while enjoying an easy fortune, is a victim of the provincial credulity of which his friends who welcome him in the “big city” they will enjoy.

The theme is universal, even if painted in Brazilian historical colors, in addition to the injustices towards the poor and the destitute, the tricks and machinations that also take away the possessions of people who, having earned easy money, do not know how to use it well and get lost in the traps set by miserly false friends.

Among the Christian beatitudes is that dedicated to those who hunger and thirst for justice, “because they will be satisfied” (Mt 5:6).