Arquivo para a ‘Linguagens’ Categoria
Worldviews, science and religions
25
Mar
Worldviews are more closely related to
philosophy and cosmology, but in literature they are also linked to science and religion. Geocentricism (the earth as the center of the universe) and the Copernican revolution, which declared the sun to be the center of the universe, correspond to scientific and religious views and both were limited worldviews.
In Heidegger’s ontological vision, he updates the term Weltanschauung, which first appeared with Kant, who understood this idea of worldview only through experience with the sensible world. For Heidegger, these are values, impressions, feelings and conceptions of an intuitive nature, prior to reflection, and thus correspond to a “worldview”.
The connection with cosmology is important, we have already highlighted the Copernican revolution, and today the influence of the discoveries of the James Webb space observatory has even contributed to a broader view of the creation of the universe, and if it was not created, and has “always” existed, this further favors the worldview of the eternal and the infinite.
The universe also informs us of scientific and religious facts, the vision of the information paradox theorized by Stephen Hawking about small radiations that “escape” from the black hole broadens the cosmological and scientific vision, while the guide star that indicated the place of Jesus’ birth could well be a new one or a supernova, a star that is born or that dies.
Scientists and observers of the cosmos are expecting the birth of a “new” star in the next few days, the name given to binary systems of a dwarf star and a red giant that explode and give off the intense glow of a rising star.
The subject has taken over astronomers’ fantasies because since September 2024 TCrB (T Coronae Borealis), the binary system near the constellation of the Crown, is about to explode.
Astronomers are predicting that the explosion is about to take place in the early hours of March 27. The TCrB (now called the Blaze Star) is 3,000 light years away and the constellation of the Crown is close to the Serpens Caput and the Bootes (pictured above).
While we observed eclipses, comets and meteors, our vision was still geocentric, looking at a wider universe corresponds to a wider world view, we have left our terrestrial bubble to admit celestial realities that are more universal than our pale blue dot.
This expression came about when the Voyager 1 spacecraft, on February 14, 1990, at a distance of six billion kilometers from Earth (passing the planet Saturn), and having completed its mission, at the suggestion of Carl Sagan, turned towards Earth and looked back to take a photo.
The horrors of war
24
Mar
The elections in Germany, in which the
debates were polarized in a way never thought possible in that country after the horrors of World War II, made many analysts think that we are already a little distant from that sad moment in the history of civilization and perhaps we no longer know how to understand the horrors of war, no matter the narrative, every war is always some kind of looting, some level of genocide and what dies first is the truth.
Despite attempts and proposals, the conflict in Eastern Europe seems to be escalating to ever more dangerous limits and entanglements of antagonistic forces. The attempt at a ceasefire has not only failed, but has also shown interests that differ from those that are declared.
The ceasefire in the Middle East, too, after a first cycle when it looked like it might enter a second phase, has once again escalated, with the Israeli army claiming last Tuesday (18/03) to be carrying out “extensive attacks” and the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry saying that 400 Palestinians were injured in the attacks.
In Eastern Europe, even though the US proposals for an initial ceasefire have been accepted, both the Russian army has carried out drone attacks on Kiev and Ukraine’s energy sources, and Ukraine has launched attacks on a nuclear weapons base in the Engels region (Saratov Oblast), as well as attacks on the capital Moscow, making any ceasefire impossible at the moment.
According to an analysis by CNN on Saturday, May 22, what Russia wants is much, much bigger than the end of Ukraine as an independent state, it wants NATO to return to the size it was in the Soviet period, countries that are now part of NATO were once in the Soviet-Russian sphere.
There is no strong view that peace is better than war, that sitting down at the table and having a diplomatic debate prevents the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians and stops fueling a global crisis that, for obvious reasons, affects life, economic balance and fraternal spirit.
There is still a long way to go in the direction of peace, to disarm the spirit not only in the countries at war, but among those who in the shadows feed a genocidal spirit of hatred and conflict, forgiveness and concord need to come from every person who wants a peaceful world.
Language and its fruits
21
Mar
Hermeneutics is the art or technique of
interpreting and explaining texts. Originating in Greek, it also applies today to the ontology and philosophy of language, and is used to interpret not only traditional texts and philosophies, but also sacred texts and legal texts.
The serious problem with language today is its perspective of a fragmentary and distorted analysis of texts, while hermeneutics is used for true interpretation (etymological aspects, translation and meaning), the use of language to justify power was more typical of the sophists in ancient modernity.
So the fruits of true linguistic expression, and of philosophical hermeneutics, was to build a branch of philosophy that studies the theory of interpretation. There are several authors, but I would highlight Hans-Georg Gadamer, who is fundamental to a humanistic perspective.
Gadamer reconstructs the concept of preconception, removing the negative charge of pre-judgment that it had acquired in illustration, giving it an essential character within hermeneutics, since it allows the fusion of horizons, within the hermeneutic circle prior to dialogue.
He thus rejects the idea of a knowledge of the past through pure reason, without the mediation of the interpreter’s own tradition, since this prevents the fusion of horizons and dialog.
He thus rejects the idea of a knowledge of the past through pure reason, without the mediation of the interpreter’s own tradition, since this prevents the fusion of horizons and dialog.
The interpreter doesn’t just carry out a “reproductive” activity of the text, but updates it according to the circumstances of the moment, which is why they speak of their ‘productive’ labor (Gadamer, 1997), there is no direct reference to Hannah Arendt’s concept of “labor”, but it fits well with the text, a natural and non-durable activity that is exhausted when it is carried out.
So is the productive use of language, words that are actions that trigger attitudes of help, rescue, solidarity and dialogue, even if they have different interpretations, the important thing is that humanitarian language leads to actions in favor of society and fruitful principles.
You can’t pick figs from thorns, a good tree can’t bear bad fruit, language that is directed towards good humanitarian initiatives won’t have negative results, so it easily moves towards a dialogue if the “fusion of horizons” is the starting point for interpretation, the basis of a hermeneutic dialogue.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. (1997) Verdade e Método: Traços fundamentais de uma hermenêutica filosófica. Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes.
Language and modernity
20
Mar
The philosophical disagreements and struggles
at the end of the Middle Ages that marked the difference between realists and nominalists ended in a suppression of the importance of language, of the exercise of thought in a form of dualistic subjectivity, since it separates subjects from objects.
It was partly due to the crisis of Western thought and partly due to the lack of a correct understanding of the importance of language that a linguistic “turnaround” began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
As is the case with all knowledge in modernity, this important turning point has also ended up being used as a metaphor in the philosophy of language, but its contribution both to contemporary thought and to understanding what kind of crisis we are experiencing is a broad and essential response: the word gives life to our actions and its meditation cannot be separated from its practice (see previous post).
There are those who prefer to date this turn to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Logical-Philosophical Treatise (1889-1951) or, even later, The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method, which Richard Rorty published in 1967. He defended this creation to the thinker Gustav Bergmann, but also points to Heidegger as one of its founders.
The important thing is to verify both the dialogue between the turn and the new logical perspective of the Vienna Circle (with whom Wittgenstein maintained contacts) and the relationship with the philosophical hermeneutics born out of Schleiermacher (“on the different ways of thinking”), He was a contemporary of Schelling, Hegel and Fichte, and thus under some influence of German idealism.
Thus oral and textual language is translated into language and interpreted according to a hermeneutic (photo).
On the other hand, the philosophical hermeneutic approach that comes from Husserl, Heidegger and their successors (such as Hannah Arendt and Peter Sloterdijk) makes a deeper break and questions even the philosophy and thought of its time, with major gaps.
The living word is the one that leads us to concrete actions far from the individualism and lack of meditation (or contemplation) of modernity, it leads to concrete gestures of humanity.
make a deeper break and question even the philosophy and thought of their time, with major gaps.
The living word is the one that leads us to concrete actions – far from the individualism and lack of meditation (or contemplation) of modernity, it leads to concrete gestures of humanity.
Work, action and contemplation
19
Mar
Hannah Arendt considered that labor, work and
action are the three spheres of human life that make up the “vita activa”, a thought that we have placed around Byung-Chul Han’s essay, which Arendt also uses to complement the Vita Contemplativa.
It is not characteristic of modern man to think in this way, and this has put human thought and even scientific and religious thought at a standstill. Narratives arise as a consequence and not as a cause of this, it is through the fragmentation of human activities that the interpretation of reality becomes subject to a limited worldview.
Labor ensures the biological survival of the individual and the species (Arendt, 1995) while work, although it doesn’t individualize man, establishes a relationship with objects and with the transformation of nature, and allows him, and this is important, to demonstrate his craftsmanship and inventiveness (Arendt, 1995), but craftsmanship and inventiveness are not separate from thought, because there man conceives of his relationship with nature as a whole.
It was industrial work that destroyed this idea of the whole between work, labor and action, but noticing that artisanal work already included a contemplative vision, “Perché non parli?” said Michelangelo when completing his work “Moses”, meaning “why not speak?” (photo).
A little noticed detail, but certainly conceived by Michelangelo when he made his work, is the support of his right arm on the tablets of the law, we would say a first biblical codex, since the Torah was a scroll, and if compared to the statue of the Greek thinker, he is resting his head on his right arm, Auguste Rodin made his version around 1880.
Thus, work, labor and action can be united with the idea of contemplation, if we think of it as the conception of a previous thinker and included in the object, in this way we reunite and re-signify work and labor, no longer as an alienated attitude, but as an ontic Being.
Therefore, human work and its labor must be united with the ontological idea of Being, and it also means an act of love for humanity, for the Other and for the one who will use, conceive or just contemplate the action of labor.
Arendt, H. (1995). A condição humana. 7th. ed. Brazil, Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária.
Psychopolitics and authoritarianism
18
Mar
The contemporary view of authority is rooted
in the idea of the power of force, of money, of authoritarianism, of the manipulation of justice and public bodies in favor of the state, but all this authority is an authority that passes away as great empires did.
The Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, drawing on various authors: Nietzsche (Will to Power), Hegel (Principles of the Philosophy of Law), Luhmann (The Communication of Power) and his main influence, Heidegger (Being and Time), established the concept of psychopolitics.
The modern techniques of power through narratives that hide the real interests of power, mainly using the new media, is what Han called psychopolitics, which replaces and goes beyond Foucault’s concept of biopolitics.
Starting from Max Weber’s concept, quoting him: “power means the opportunity, within a social relationship, to impose one’s will even against resistance, regardless of what this opportunity is based on” (Han, 2019, p. 22, quoting Weber’s Economy and Society), this author already saw the modern trend of this psychological manipulation.
This approach replaces the concept of “domination” (we’ve already posted something about this here), which is “obedience to an order, which is sociologically ”more precise”, with the concept of a pure game of narratives that change this order according to temporal and social necessity.
The root of the idea of the modern state, different from the Greek one which was the overcoming of power as a sophism of manipulation, pure rhetoric, lies in Hegel: “in the longing for an absence of limits, for an infinitude which, however, would not be infinite power” (pg. 123), and what takes away the idea of the eternal and the transcendent, saying of its true limits is not an unlimited will for power: “Religion is fundamentally profoundly peaceful. It is goodness” (p. 124), but there are those who also see it only as a power, which is Hegelianism.
The biblical idea is the opposite of this arrogance, even if “religious” people use it, because “But it is not so among you; on the contrary, whoever wants to become great among you, let him serve you; and whoever wants to be first among you shall be servant of all” (Mark 10:43), “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled” (Matthew 5:6), there is no incitement to hatred, violence or the segregation of peoples or races in a good biblical reading.
So is the idea of the little ones, the children and the peaceful ones who are linked to the divine Kingdom.
Han, Byung-Chul. (2018) What is power? NY; Wiley. (citations is 2019 portuguese version)
Language, being and reconciliation
14
Mar
Since ancient philosophy, language has
been considered ontologically linked to Being, Plato’s World of Ideas (eidos) is nothing other than this, for Aristotle language is a “tool” of thought that allows us to represent reality.
However, modernity, under the pretense of realist objectivity, has ignored this simple reality where any action begins with thought and is transformed into language, in the words of contemporary thinker Heidegger, language is the “dwelling place of being”.
The “language of machines” or the codification of thought already expressed in a human “message” and transformed into codes, is not exactly what should be thought of in ontology, all of Heidegger’s texts and also those of the philosopher Byung-Chul Han complain about this technical view of language, but the 20th century began with the so-called linguistic turn.
Thus, the language thought of by Alan Turing and Claude Shannon is confined to the universe of machines, while language thought of ontologically is the “opening up of being” and the search for a universe of fulfillment and reconciliation, as Rainer Rilke (1875-1926) says: “We, the violent, last longer. But when, in which life, will we be finally open and welcoming?”
Byung-Chul Han recalls that the epic poem Iliad begins with the phrase: “Aira, Goddess, celebrates Achilles’ wrathful rage, which brought so many sorrows to the Achaeans, and cast countless souls into Hades.” We’ve already written several posts about the myth of Hades, the god of the underworld where souls go, and violence still marks our civilizing process.
Language as an expression of our thoughts and our interiority cannot be separated from active life (Hannah Arendt and Byun-Chul Han). Heidegger, who had a strong influence on both of them, sees it as a bridge linking the inside and outside of man, in such a way that speaking is thought of as an activity that takes place through man and is thus an ontological act (photo – A mural in Teotihuacan, Mexico, c. 2nd century).
This vision of language “through man” thus precedes its dissemination by the media and cannot be thought of as mere transmitters and receivers, since whatever the medium, it is preceded by human thought and language and in it the being “opens up”.
It can therefore be said that violence is an aspect of the lack of openness of being, motivated by thought and this is constructed by methodologies and ways of understanding reality as having a single path to violence where reconciliation may seem impossible.
Man and reality itself are not binary: Being and Non-Being, affirmative and negative, in man because he has sensitive and cognitive inner stages where the engines of thought are activated, and in reality because of the discoveries of quantum physics and the complex universe that astrophysics has created.
Communication, Shannon and data
13
Mar
Born in the small town of Gaylord, Claude
Shannon watched the creation of telegraphs using the barbed wire of the mountain farms in his region from an early age. He soon built his own telegraph, unlike the telephone companies of the time, in the countryside they continued to use barbed wire to send messages as telegraphs.
Shannon went to study at the University of Michigan, interested in mathematics and communication, where he discovered an advertisement asking for monitors for Vannevar Bush’s famous MIT Laboratory, where students finishing their theses were looking for a machine to tabulate data, unlike Charles Babbage’s historic English computer, this was just a machine to tabulate data, we could say a nascent data science.
The MIT laboratory was where “professors and students turned to the Differential Analyzer in moments of desperation, and when it was possible to solve equations with a margin of error of 2%, the operator of the Claude Shannon Machine was happy” (Gleick, 2013, p. 181).
The circuits of this machine were made up of ordinary switches and special switches called relays, direct descendants of the telegraph and predecessors of the logic of 0 and 1, whose logic was known to Bush, called Boole’s Algebra, which Shannon learned there.
This was where the data processed by Bush’s differential analyzer and the new logic of 0 and 1 came together, the other point we made in the previous post, the concern with an intelligible language for the machine and the problem of coding and decoding messages modified into electrical signals in the logic of 0 and 1.
Claude Shannon’s important point and great collaboration, expressed in his Mathematical Theory of Communication, determined how many coded signals would be needed to maintain the integrity of the message before the coding process.
The so-called Shannon Theorem determines that a number of signals twice the highest frequency communicated through the channel are required between the sender, who precedes the message sent, and the receiver, who decodes the signal and reconstructs the message. In order for this message to remain unchanged, the number of signals in Shannon’s Theorem must be observed.
The noise problem depends exclusively on the distance and the way the signal is captured and sampled (segmented into a quantity that complies with the theorem) while the sender and receiver problem depend on the transformation of the message into a signal (i.e. the transformation of an analog signal into a digital signal and vice versa).
The message sent and the message received depend only on human sources, as the sender and receiver are electrical, digital or photonic devices. Quantum devices are already being developed and could represent greater speed and signal integrity.
Gleick. (2013) Informação: uma história, uma teoria e uma enxurrada. (Information: a history, a theory and a flood). Trad. Augusto Cali. Brazil, São Paulo: ed. Companhia das Letras.
Thought and information technology
12
Mar
The origins of almost all realities (if we don’t
consider the divine and eternal) come from human thought, the idea of politics in the Greek polis, the idea of the “art of war”, from the law codes of Hammurabi (1792 to 1750 BC) to modern contractualists, compilations of religious treatises, epistemological constructions of the sciences and computer science could not be left out.
In 1900, when physics and mathematics seemed to give an air of precision and certainty to the scientific universe, positivism still reigned in law, a German mathematician David Hilbert proposed 23 “final” problems for mathematics at an International Congress in Paris in 1900.
Among these was the second problem: the finitist solution to the consistency of the axioms of arithmetic, which together with the sixth problem, which was the axiomatization of physics, seemed to give a logical and precise finish to all of science, but there had already been a return to the question of Being through Husserl and Heidegger, and this returned thought to human complexity.
Kurt Gödel, a member of the Vienna Circle who eschewed this logic and for this reason was called a neologicist, proved the incompleteness of the second problem, that arithmetic was either consistent or complete, thus remaining in a paradox, called Gödel’s Paradox.
The question of arithmetic is important to understand the origin of the idea of algorithms, which were previously just formulas like Bhaskara’s formula (for 2nd degree equations), complex solutions to differential equations, while physics had the problem of formulating all of physics in a single theory, the so-called Standard Theory of Physics, but quantum mechanics and the theory of general relativity, where time and space are not absolute, changed this scenario.
The meeting of Claude Shannon and Alain Turing, who were working on secret projects to code transmissions (made for the Roosevelt government) and decode the Enigma machine captured from the Nazis (Turing’s secret project) will create a new event.
Unable to talk about their secret projects (Gleick, 2013, p. 213), they talked about Gödel’s paradox and wondered about the possibility of the machine elaborating thoughts, even if it was something limited, and both developed theories about language and algorithms.
While Turing devised a state machine that, through back and forth movements of a tape recording symbols, would produce intelligible sentences, Shannon worked on a similar model (using a theory called Markov chain) that, through finite vocabularies, could compose sentences and formulate broader ideas.
Alain Turing’s definitive contribution was the so-called Finite State Machine, whose model was completed by Alonzo Church, while Claude Shannon left the contribution of a Mathematical Theory for Communication, his theory establishing the amount necessary for the information transmitted not to be damaged, but within the limits of the “machine”.
The reductionist idea that it is possible to carry out actions without a necessary, elaborate, meditated and tested thought is part of current pseudo-scientific narratives.
Gleick. (2013) . Informação: uma história, uma teoria e uma enxurrada. (Information: a history, a theory and a flood). Transl. Augusto Cali. Brazil, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Thinkers with full bellies
11
Mar
Modern society is characterized by an absence
of serious developed thought. What is called “critical thinking” is nothing more than the rejection of any thinker who tries to think outside the ideological bubble, or of vulgar and superficial narratives.
They don’t know about the great classical works, even those professed by Kant, Hegel or Marx, deep literature by Zolá, Vitor Hugo, Proust, Balzac, Camus or more current ones like George Orwell, James Joyce, Gabriel Garcia Marques or Jorge Luís Borges, Eurocentric in their shallow knowledge, preferring the contentless criticism of thinkers who challenge all current thinking as fragmentary: Heidegger, Gadamer, Peter Sloterdijk and Byung-Chul Han.
Their bellies are full of food that fills their stomachs, but it’s far from being the kind of food that provides a deep and well-founded critique of current thinking: decadent sociologism, little meditation (read Hannah Arent or Byung-Chul Han on the Vita Contemplativa) and little knowledge of even the late Enlightenment that they profess.
At most, they know Bauman’s liquid and Eurocentric thinking, Foucault’s biopolitics or Jean Jaurès’ revisionism, they don’t know Edgar Morin’s transdisciplinarity (he calls this partial intellectuality blind intelligence), Barsarab Nicolescu’s third-included and the quantum physics revolution (it’s no longer a binary dualism), thought is dated in modernity, and they don’t know its origin in ancient Greece.
It is necessary to deny authors who propose new paradigms so that their narrative, based on authors from the last century, is coherent. At best, they talk about original cultures without knowing the great modern African and Latin sociologists such as Achille Mbembe, Franz Fanon and Anibal Quijano.
The belly is full of a culture that is already outdated, even without the necessary updating and without a complete reading of the works on which the positions are based, the psychopolitics of Byung-Chul Han, the spherology of Peter Sloterdijk (Sphere I: bubles) and the transdisciplinarity of Morin cannot be understood, it is a shallow and incomplete revisionism due to the fragility of the readings.
The easy criticism and consequent narrative are based on the chaotic social and cultural scenario we face, without a complete and radical analysis that escapes the bubbles we are trapped in, that understands and updates thinking beyond idealistic dualism.
In fact, we need a few words and thoughts, but profound ones that are forgotten or dormant: what kind of hope do we have for today’s society? What kind of beliefs do we have that don’t involve power and domination? What kind of science is it that deals with the whole man so that it can also deal with every man? What is our relationship with the Other? (Lévinas, Ricoeur, Buber and others).
Without reading Thomas Aquinas, they will remain readers of only one book, without reading St. Augustine, they will not come out of Manichaeism, because evil is the absence of Love and Forgiveness.
Han, Byung-Chul. (2019) O que é poder? Trad. Gabriel Salvi Philipson. Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes.
Sloterdijk, Peter. (2019) Esferas I: Bolhas. Trad. José Oscar de Almeida Marques. Brazil, São Paulo: Estação Liberdade.
Morin, Edgar. (2015) Introdução ao pensamento complexo. Trad. Eliane Lisboa. 5.ed. Brazil, Porto Alegre: Sulina.
