Arquivo para a ‘Linguagens’ Categoria
Truth, method and freedom
09
Apr
Truth is not a logical rule or even a scientific
pursuit, science moves in steps towards the construction of knowledge, what is called epistemology, at its great root was the denial of the doxa, of mere opinion.
The truth, Socrates said (through Plato’s speeches) “is not with men, but among men”, so dialogues and opposing ideals are necessary to arrive at what Hans-Georg Gadamer formulates as the “hermeneutic circle” (we’ve already posted about it here).
Hermeneutics is the art of understanding what is written or spoken, so it is the search for what each author formulates, or their mental map, and this fidelity requires a study not to put ideas or words into the mouth of the author, but to discover their intentionality.
Contemporary narratives reflect this lack of hermeneutics, with each author having to give the other their own discourse. This is only possible by restricting freedom, or intimidating the Other, what in today’s culture is called hater, which is characteristic of dogmatic authoritarianism, of those who only know how to listen to their own discourse and refuse to understand what is different.
Freedom is essential for dialog, for an authentic construction of knowledge, and a sincere search for the truth. It is necessary to listen to the other (the spoken or written text) in order to produce a new fusion of horizons, the shared process between interlocutors.
The logic of the narrative is the imposition of a discourse that claims to be unique and true, so freedom is not allowed, interlocutors are interrupted or silenced in their discourse, so that only one narrative survives and its values and arguments are imposed.
The modern idolization of the state as the only source of power, even if it refers to itself as democratic, is the incapacity for a hermeneutic and a method where dialogue is open.
We need to suspend our concepts, put an epoché in parentheses.
The hermeneutic circle is not an end in itself. Hans-Georg Gadamer reflects at length on Dilthey’s thinking, which he considers to be romantic and partly one of the influences on Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics and the ways in which he was committed to Cartesian reason and its logic.
Trapped in this logic, the dualism of subject and object remains, and according to Gadamer (1998, p. 340) it goes back to Vico who had already affirmed the epistemological primacy of the world of history according to the human spirit, this type of knowledge makes subject and object interconnected.
Thus truth is ontological, proper to the human spirit, proper to its being, in it there is truth.
Gadamer, H-G. (1998) Verdade e método: traços fundamentais de uma hermenêutica filosófica. Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes.
Evil and its ontology
08
Apr
Although evil can be entified, i.e. become an
entity, whether in the sense of systemic evil or an entity that personifies evil (Greek daemons or a demon in theology or an attitude), Husserl will realize, under the influence of his teacher Franz Brentano (father of social psychology), that it is “the complete objective unity that corresponds to the ideal system of all truths of fact, and is inseparable from it” (Husserl, 2005, p. 136). 136).
Of course, he is talking about truth, but he understands it as having an objective meaning, so its negation is nothing other than the negation of the Being of the entity, and that this correspondence negates its Noesis and does not allow the truth to be externalized, being an objective unity of Being, the noema requires a conscious vision of the object.
This is because each type of object has its own possible unfolding, so to speak, it has its own method prescribed a priori by laws of essence determined by the eidos* of the objectivity in question (Husserl, 2006, 309), which means that it is the essence of the objectivity that predetermines the type of concordant development one has of its experience, it is an experience, and so if it is not true it is its negation, it is evil.
There can be an experience of evidence in this experience of the object, and this contributes to its status as an entity as a “true being” (Husserl, 2006, p. 309), what Husserl called “Lebenswelt”, a logic of life, in this case of the experience with the object.
If we don’t understand that small faults, ignorance of the Other, of nature as a habitat, and everything that distances us from Being as a construction of truth, here it is ontological, we are denying and altering the meaning of what will be expressed in the object, of course it is always an influence of the world view, and in it may lie the essence of non-truth.
Augustine of Hippo had said it another way: evil is the absence of Love, and today we can update this by saying that it is the absence of empathy, solidarity and humanism in every person, those who are not “of my group”, “of my bubble” or even of the “good” in a logical rather than ontological sense.
These are attitudes that we must rethink, rash judgments, one-sided views of the world and of Being, every corruption of the soul begins with a corruption of the truth, it is a negation of the truth.
Husserl, E. (2006) Ideias para uma fenomenologia pura e para uma filosofia fenomenológica. Tradução de M. Suzuki. Brazil, Aparecida, SP: Ideias & Letras.
*according to phenomenology, relating to the essence of things.
Between finitude and eternity
04
Apr
The Greek gods and myths were immortal, 
but their mixture with nature made them almost as human as men, they had vices so much so that they had their own goddess, the goddess Cacia or Kakía (Kακία), who personified vice and immorality, and was opposed to areté (virtue).
We’ve already posted about the differences in the concepts of immortality and eternity in Hannah Arendt and in her reading of Byung-Chul Han (see the post), the question that remains is how possible it is in the space-time we live in to be aware of and able to experience this desire for the eternal.
There are those who hope for a great miracle from science, freezing their bodies to wait for this future (cryogenics), the controversial Raymond Kurzweil wrote in 2005: The Singularity is Near: when humans transcend biology, and spent years preparing his body for immortality, but now at 77 he has reduced the amount of medication he takes for this, he made computer software at 15 and is one of Bill Gates’ advisors.
But human delirium will not give in to the most plausible and generous idea of eternity, the universe is there, now with the fantastic discoveries of the James Webb megatelescope there is already the theory that it has always been there, and another even more plausible one that time is an illusion.
A quote from Byung-Chul about Heidegger (in his Black Notebooks) is interesting: “What would happen if the presentiment of the silent power of inactive reflection were to disappear?” (Han, 2023, p. 63), of course the question is philosophical, yet it refers to being: “the presentiment is not deficient knowledge, it opens us up to being, to there, which escapes propositional knowledge” (idem).
It is a “preliminary step on the ladder of knowledge.” He writes, quoting Heidegger, to establish a pre-category of the conscious as Being-Disposed [Gestimmt-Sein], explaining: “It is not a subjective state that colors the objective world. It is the world … it is more objective than the object, but without itself being an object” (page 66).
So we “cannot dispose of the disposition. It takes us over“ (p. 67), not activity, but being-thrown [Geworfenheit] as original ontological passivity defines our original being-in-the-world” (idem, p. 67), so we have to deny it because the world “reveals itself in its unavailability” (idem), the disposition precedes all activity, and concludes, it is de-fining.
He even defines our thinking, which means “opening our ears”, listening and corresponding, and quotes Heidegger again: “Philosophy is the truly consummate correspondence that speaks insofar as it heeds the call of the being of the entity” (p. 68).
And he reflects on Artificial Intelligence, which “cannot think, because it is not capable of pathos. Suffering and suffering are states that cannot be reached by any machine“ (p. 69), man can reach renunciation, Heidegger thought: ”Renunciation is a passion for the unavailable … renunciation gives“ (p. 71), being: ”gives itself in renunciation. Thus, renunciation becomes an ‘gratitude'” (p. 72) again quoting Heidegger.
It is true that Heidegger is close to this feeling of eternity, and Byung-Chul Han is very close to it, writing: “the salvation of the Earth depends on this ethic of inactivity” and quoting Heidegger: “to save means, in fact: to leave something free in its own essence” (pg. 73)
Acting according to the Vita Activa
03
Apr
As explained above, the Vita Activa (Action´s life)
is not separate from the Vita Contemplativa, this was already elaborated in Hannah Arendt and will be dealt with at length in Byung Chul Han’s Vita Contemplativa (Contemplative´s life).
In order to establish parallels, it is necessary to understand that Arendt takes up Aristotle, who saw three dignified ways of life for man: people subjected to slavery by war remained tied to their masters only to meet the needs of staying alive, and the Greek philosopher saw the life of artisans and markets in a similar way.
For him, the “political” man was truly free and could devote himself to contemplation, so dignity was linked to contemplation, but seen as the life of fortune (the Eutychia) which personified destiny, good fortune, prosperity and abundance.
This is because although man aspired to immortality, it is life without death on this earth, it is an “immanent” life in this world, which Arendt differentiates from eternity, which aspires to a beyond the cosmos, or the cosmos itself thought of as the creation of transcendent eternity.
Immortality, on the other hand, is continuity in time, it is life without death on this earth, it is life “immanent” to this world, the life of the Olympian gods was like this in the way the Greeks understood nature and its “immortality” in the cosmos, with man’s mortality being what distinguished him in the cosmos.
Byung-Chul describes that “just before Arendt’s Vita activa or On Active Life, Heidegger gave a lecture entitled Science and Reflection [Besinnung]. As opposed to action, which propels us forward, reflection brings us back to where we have always been“ (Han, 2023, p. 62), thus ”a dimension of inactivity is inherent in reflection” (idem).
For Hannah Arendt, labor and work are two elements that make up human activity, along with action, while labor corresponds to the biological activity of human beings for their survival as a species, while work allows for the creation of objects and the transformation of nature.
The society of performance, of the media and of impulsivity shifts the being towards an action that is neither good nor bad, it is pure reactivity and thus incapable of conscious action, the action of Being.
It is still easy to see those who act wisely by the results of their actions, not a simple response to some speech or action, but reflection in action, even if it is silence.
Han, B.-C. (2023) Vita contemplativa: ou sobre a inatividade. Transl. Lucas Machado, Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes.
Silence, an essential part of language
02
Apr
The question of silence is fundamental
in the appreciation of language, the spoken word presupposes that there is an interlocutor capable of silence, if it is profound, the epoché (emptiness) occurs, which all philosophers in a certain way impose so that the word can be articulated in thought, it is before and complementary to action, Foucault was one of the philosophers who realized this gap back in the 19th century.
In the hermeneutic circle, it precedes the process of interpretation and is necessary for dialog and the “fusion of horizons” that philosophical hermeneutics demands. This mere acting on the impulse of language omits an essential part, which is reflection, meditation or, for minds that really seek the truth, contemplation.
Hans-Georg Gadamer was the great philosopher of hermeneutics. He argues that there is not only meaningful knowledge in the humanities that can be reduced to that of the natural sciences, a logic and a language that is only grammatical; there is a deeper truth than the scientific method.
It is not a simple return to metaphysics, it is acting according to thinking, according to an articulation of human and collective consciousness, capable of seeing the other and their hermeneutics, capable of reviewing the humanism of every man, without a vertical reading, of the simple authority of power.
Agamben in “The Language of Silence” also speaks of this false articulation as a field that seeks to apprehend with reason alone, it is an “experience of language that goes towards thought without ever reaching it; it is the tension and infinite nostalgia that never understands what it wants to apprehend and never reaches where it wants to go” (Agamben, 2013, Brazil, São Paulo, Magazine Fronteira Z, p. 293).
The famous song of the sirens that lured the sailors to their deaths in Homer’s Odyssey (photo mosaic from the 3rd century, National Museum of the Bardo, Tunis) is also the lack of silence that Ulysses saw in his subordinates (Ulysses covers his ears and ties the sailors to the ship’s mast), which became a metaphor for the chatter that enchants his followers; the greatest dictators were always good orators.
So putting contemplation into action requires true contemplation, the word read is a guide whenever it is purified by an “art of loving”, of showing solidarity, of humanizing action.
Small actions, lack of thought and big disasters
01
Apr
I read it from a psychologist: “It’s not big actions
that cause big effects!” We need to pay attention to small vices, small faults that we think are tolerable, because over time they become big problems. The idea of letting everything around us off the hook makes us more vulnerable to frustration, life’s difficulties, disappointments and obstacles.
It’s also not about the rigid discipline of dictators and people with little dialog, owners of the truth, pseudo “thinkers” who are increasingly common in the daily life of media society.
The ideas of simplification, of doing what “feels right”, freedom without obligations, a world without obstacles and without pain (Byung-Chul Han: The Palliative Society: Pain Today), create a world of rebels without measuring consequences, gratuitous hatreds, intolerance, bubbles and obstacles to dialog, to the right of the Other and the different, in short, the society of hatred and war.
The idea that every action is external is characteristic of non-thinking, acting impulsively and this is not only linked to the new media, but also to the absence of reflection, meditation and contemplation (Vita Contemplativa, Hannah Arendt and Byung-Chul Han), verbose thoughts without reflection.
Han explains by quoting Arendt: “Hannah Arendt’s Vita activa begins with the distinction between immortality and eternity” (Han, 2023, p. 144), and continues: “Surrounded by the infinite, the human being, as a moral being, seeks immortality by creating works that remain” (Han, p. 145), but “in contrast, the objective of the vita contemplativa is not, according to Arendt, to persist and last in time, but the experience of the eternal, which transcends both time and also the surrounding world” (Han, p. 145).
She clarifies that Arendt herself may have intended to be immortal when she wrote, but “even writing can be a contemplation that has nothing to do with the search for immortality” (p. 146), and she is surprised that Socrates didn’t write, thus renouncing immortality, she doesn’t quote, but Jesus didn’t write either, the gospels were only written by his disciples.
Small actions, lack of thought and big disasters
I read it from a psychologist: “It’s not big actions that cause big effects!” We need to pay attention to small vices, small faults that we think are tolerable, because over time they become big problems. The idea of letting everything around us off the hook makes us more vulnerable to frustration, life’s difficulties, disappointments and obstacles.
It’s also not about the rigid discipline of dictators and people with little dialog, owners of the truth, pseudo “thinkers” who are increasingly common in the daily life of media society.
The ideas of simplification, of doing what “feels right”, freedom without obligations, a world without obstacles and without pain (Byung-Chul Han: The Palliative Society: Pain Today), create a world of rebels without measuring consequences, gratuitous hatreds, intolerance, bubbles and obstacles to dialog, to the right of the Other and the different, in short, the society of hatred and war.
The idea that every action is external is characteristic of non-thinking, acting impulsively and this is not only linked to the new media, but also to the absence of reflection, meditation and contemplation (Vita Contemplativa, Hannah Arendt and Byung-Chul Han), verbose thoughts without reflection.
Han explains by quoting Arendt: “Hannah Arendt’s Vita active (active life) begins with the distinction between immortality and eternity” (Han, 2023, p. 144), and continues: “Surrounded by the infinite, the human being, as a moral being, seeks immortality by creating works that remain” (Han, p. 145), but “in contrast, the objective of the vita contemplative(contemplative life) is not, according to Arendt, to persist and last in time, but the experience of the eternal, which transcends both time and also the surrounding world” (Han, p. 145).
She clarifies that Arendt herself may have intended to be immortal when she wrote, but “even writing can be a contemplation that has nothing to do with the search for immortality” (p. 146), and she is surprised that Socrates didn’t write, thus renouncing immortality, she doesn’t quote, but Jesus didn’t write either, the gospels were only written by his disciples.
Accepting small setbacks, starting over and thinking about why you stumbled helps you move forward.
Han, B.-C. (2023) Vita contemplativa: ou sobre a inatividade. Transl. Lucas Machado, Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes.
Bad agreements and threats
31
Mar
On the same day (March 18) as the partial truce
agreement (only the attack on Ukrainian energy stations and ships in Russia’s Black Sea), Ukraine claimed to have been attacked at 8 energy stations.
Russia wants the Russian state bank to be reconnected to the international payment system, but Europe rejects this position, saying that this will only happen when Russia withdraws all troops from Ukraine.
One thing is clear about Putin’s personality: he is a clue, but he doesn’t bluff. When he made the peace agreement on Crimea, curiously enough on March 18, 2014, in Putin’s view he is doing the same as NATO, advancing on enemy terrain and demarcating positions.
Europe fears further advances on NATO countries, judging by history Poland could be the next step, there Hitler advanced in WWII and the regime established by the Soviet state in the post-war period was also cruel to the Polish people, remember the revolts of the Solidarity Union in Gdansk, already in the final period of General Jaruzelski’s regime.
Truce agreements have little support because there are no “neutral” forces to guarantee them.
The Middle East is also living under bad agreements: after the Hamas-Israel agreement, there has been little or no progress towards a broader truce, the recognition of Palestinian territory has not moved forward, Israel and the US want to maintain control of the region under the threat of new attacks on Israel.
Iran is a character in the shadows of this war, because it finances and supports extremist groups. Trump’s threat to bomb Tehran was met with the response that the US will receive a “reciprocal blow”, what Trump wants is a new nuclear agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear weapons, it is worth remembering that they are partners with Russia, which already has a vast nuclear arsenal.
The world is in the shadow of an insane war, and those who don’t think about this insanity don’t know the horrors and consequences of a war today.
The figure above is a sculpture made by Marie Uchytilová in Lydice, Czech Republic, in memory of a group of 82 children asphyxiated with gas in the Chelmno extermination camp in the summer of 1942.
Narrative, languages and orality
28
Mar
Taking up one of Byung-Chul Han’s words: “Narrative is the capacity of
the spirit to overcome the contingency of the body”, this capacity to overcome the contingency of the body is linked not only to the memory of poetic and conative language, but also to the spiritual meanings and values that modernity has abandoned under the pretext of creating an “objective” vision (A crise da narração, Byung Chul Han, Vozes, 2023, brazilian edition).
The telling of the stories of peoples, their cultures and religions are thus key factors in overcoming such a dramatic moment in the history of communication.
The languages developed for machines are capable of producing narratives with a set of words that are part of their vocabulary, but without the imagery of the voices that perform the storytelling, especially in oral cultures, where writing is secondary.
The dramatic text is also a genre in which acts, scenes, rubrics and speeches are presented, which is why it is part of a theatrical form or a-presentation, in the sense that the presentation is both a telling of a story and its negation, since it involves fiction, storytelling always has a present aspect, this is the meaning.
The dispute between nominalists and realists in the lower middle ages (11th to 14th centuries) ended up neglecting the importance of language, but the linguistic turn of the late 19th century brought back its importance in studies such as grammar, semiotics, etymology and, more broadly, linguistics.
The beginning of modernity is marked by the break between the metaphysical function of language and the use of objectivity as a mode of expression, but this is only one of the functions of language, the Russian linguist Roman Jacobson recalls the functions: phatic, poetic, conative and metalinguistic, in which modern codes are inserted by example: Morse, digital and quantum, where “the code explains the code itself, that is, the language explains the language itself”, and this should be the only context where the concepts of sender/receiver apply.
The linguistic turn occurs in the midst of the crisis of idealist and positivist thinking in modernity: Husserl, Heidegger, Hanna Arendt are fundamental, although they are most remembered: Noam Chomsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault and Ferdinand de Saussure.
In the 1950s, Noam Chomsky wrote variations on these linguistic styles that are more technical, involve a restricted grammar and regular expressions. It is used in computer science and formal language theory.
When proclaiming texts in an oral culture, such as the Bible, it is necessary to have meaning, and in particular to make a hermeneutic of its presentation (repeat it when telling).
Language, truth and the eternal
27
Mar
Leibniz (1646-1716) theorized that truth is
related to reason: “I understand by reason, not the faculty of reasoning, which can be used well or badly, but the chain of truths which can only produce truths, and one truth cannot be contrary to another”, so from a half-truth a truth cannot emerge, this is the problem with contemporary narratives and truth is linked to Being through language.
Leibniz’s philosophical project included a “symbolic language” that would be the very language of philosophy, he called it “characterística universalis” through which we could express truth, but in his time the division between realism and nominalism led to a victory for Enlightenment realism, and Leibniz and his disciple Christian Wolff (1679-1754) were rejected (picture).
Leibniz thought of three principles for his project: Identifying and structuring simple ideas hierarchically, stipulating a suitable system of signs and establishing logical rules for composing complex ideas.
Christian Wolf goes so far as to elaborate a system of concepts, different from Porphyry’s tree of knowledge, but also based on Aristotelian thought (Isagoge). It is from Porphyry (232-304) that Boethius takes the famous quarrel about universals: whether universals are things or just words (categories of Aristotle) that we attribute as names to things.
Modern ontology, especially in Hannah Arendt and her interpreter Byung-Chul Han, creates new concepts that link this dualism in thinking about the Vita Activa and the Vita Contemplativa: “the quest for immortality, for immortal glory, is, according to Arendt, ”the source and center of the vita activa“ (Han, 2023, p. 145), but ”he must return to his surrounding world” (idem).
One thus lives in a paradox between the eternal and the temporal: “as soon, however, as a thinker abandons the experience of the eternal and begins to write, he surrenders to the vita activa, whose ultimate goal is immortality” (pgs. 145-146).
Arendt “marvels at Socrates who doesn’t write, who voluntarily renounces immortality” (Han, 2023, p. 146), even though writing “can be a contemplation that has nothing to do with the quest for immortality” (Han, 2023, p. 146), one can also think of the experience of Jesus who didn’t write at all, so one should follow his word and his example and not his writing, thus orality has “vita activa” (actions life) while writing seeks potency.
Arendt also recalls Plato, but Han thinks that this “distorts” Plato’s allegory, “it is the story of a philosopher who frees himself from the chains that bind him and his companions” (pp. 147-148), he acts when he returns to the cave “with its shadows, to a regime of truth”.
To put words into the vita activa is therefore to imitate them, neither proclaiming them nor quoting them, says Han: “The vita activa without the vita contemplativa is blind” (Han, 2023, p. 149).
Han, B.-C. (2023). Vita Contemplativa: ou sobre a inatividade. Trad. Lucas Machado, Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes.
Language, being and the infinite
26
Mar
Language and being are ontologically linked,
that is to say, language is a mode of being that Heidegger calls Dasein and presents itself in the fundamental constitution of being-in-the-world.
However, the limits of language are not limits for being, it is the expression of the communication of our connection with the other and with the world, the characteristic mark of language is the sign (or the sign as semiotics conceptualizes it) because it is what will identify knowledge, it shows it the object and grants it a “re-presentation” (here to recall the concept of “present).
On the other hand, the ethicality as objectivity (this is a Hegelian concept that Heidegger uses) of the representative (which is why he uses “re-”) gives it a present validity of the object, so it is the word that produces knowledge that grants a truth of correction of representation, so it has a logical truth and thus other corrections will be necessary, but all finite in time.
The limits of representation lie in listening attentively and silently to the other of the si-impersonal that we all bring into our relationships, and it is by listening appropriately to the coexistent other that the being-there comes to understand what really matters in the relationship with itself and with the other.
In his work “The Road to Language” (2003), written in the 1950s (Heidegger died in 1976), he states that speaking is not the same as saying, because you can speak a lot without saying anything; on the other hand, by keeping quiet and being silent, someone can say a lot, which means that speaking can be just showing, appearing, seeing and no longer listening.
There is nothing more important than in media periods when we want to listen to public parlors and we don’t listen to the other in our inner silence, the Greeks and phenomenology call it epoché, it is so important that no really true philosophy or religion can refrain from this resource, so we have an empty philosophy, thinkers with full bellies and vain.
The step to go beyond, to extend our knowledge beyond worldly representation is to unveil the world, since its re-revelation is only a new veiling, unveiling makes us go beyond to reach what for present objectivity seems impossible, it is neither about wealth, nor utilitarian goods, nor public visibility, but an encounter with Being.
In his Letter on Humanism (1949), in which he analyzes his turning point during the 1930s and early 1940s, he states that his thought was directed towards the relationship of being to the essence of man, but it is this Heidegger that Peter Sloterdijk questions because he only saw one side of the process, the forgetting of being, and left unthought its properly domesticating character, in his book: “Rules for the human park” in which he questions bioengineering, technology that puts the humanitarian question in crisis again.
Reaching beyond human limits has been a challenge for the process of civilization, its is divine.
Heidegger, Martin. (2003) A caminho da linguagem. Tradução de Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback. Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes; Bragança Paulista, SP: Editora Universitária São Francisco.
