Arquivo para a ‘Método e Verdade Científica’ Categoria
Serenity and the thinking that calculates
16
Mar
Heidegger’s book “Serenity” will divide contemporary thought into that which calculates
and that which meditates, on which it calculates it states:
“The thinking that calculates (das rechnende Denken) makes calculations. It makes calculations with continually new possibilities, always with greater perspectives and at the same time more economical. The thought that calculates goes from opportunity to opportunity. The thinking that calculates never stops, never comes to meditate.” (p. 13).
He argues that this is not a “higher” meditation, every man thinks and thought can lead to meditation, just meditate on the here and now that is around us.
Heidegger reminds us that we should all think about our roots, said in a more contemporary way, not denying our origins and their influences in our world view, even if limited, he states: “the rooting (die Bodentändigkeit) of the current Man is threatened in his most intimate essence. More: the loss of rootedness is not provoked only by external circumstances and fatalities of destiny, nor is it the effect of the negligence and superficial way of Men. The loss of grounding comes from the spirit of the times into which we were all born” (p. 17).
This is what makes Heidegger and other current philosophers analyze the foundations of current thought, Edgar Morin also speaks of this need to overcome this thought, alerting to the contemporary view of education.
The most current and surprising vision of Heidegger, published in 1955, is the characteristic of our time where “the most tormenting is the atomic bomb”, he realizes that the thinking he calculates sees only the industrial possibilities and liberation of the energies of nature, however the philosopher meditates on what this domain means.
“The hidden power in contemporary technology determines Man’s relationship with what exists. Dominate the entire Earth. Man is already starting to leave the Earth towards cosmic space …” (p. 19), which, in addition to being incredibly current, also had an omen of the future.
But he did not fail to see the danger of these “great atomic energies”, and thus: “assures humanity that such colossal energies, suddenly, anywhere – even without warlike actions -, do not escape our control, and “take the brakes on us teeth” and annihilate everything?” (p.20).
We saw the accidents of Chernobyl and Fukushima, this loss of control, now we see a war that points to the warlike use of these forces, Heidegger is right to ask for serenity and meditation.
HEIDEGGER, M. Serenity. trans. Translation by Maria Madalena Andrade and Olga Santos. Lisbon: Instituto Piaget, s/d.
Clearing: method and contestation
08
Mar
It is through phenomenology that it is possible to resume the positivity of the being
in relation to the only possible transcendentality, where the thing opens up in the dimension of the transcendental, the one that we developed in last week’s post and which in a certain way is opposed to Kant’s transcendent, which goes towards the knowledge of the object and for this reason it is confused with subjectivity.
In phenomenology, there is an intentional consciousness in its “a priori”, taken in a similar way to the subjective (proper of the subject), however, consciousness as a phenomenon reveals what is hidden, what the Greeks called “alétheia”, but at that moment science and all awareness of it was early.
In the phenomenal experience of the clearing (lichtung) there is the truth of the being that gives itself with a kind of “arch-phenomenon” (Ereignis), this is the very thing of phenomenology, where its intentionality is, but this also remains hidden.
If we create a void in consciousness in a phenomenal way (the phenomenological epoche), we open ourselves to our truth, we can enter a clearing even before an external event clears us up, this is the reason why humanism in both Heidegger and Sloterdijk is tied to history.
It was Hans Georg Gadamer who developed “The Question of Historical Consciousness” in his contestation of the romantic historical truth which is a quasi-determinism defended by many variants of leftist thought (Marx did not defend it), however there is the question of “natural time” in opposition to “human time”, a self-awareness of consciousness itself.
The hermeneutic circle method is a way to break this conception of consciousness that is only “temporal”, but it comes up against what must be “beyond the human”, shrouded in mystery and vices of historical interpretation.
Rüsen (2011) says that there is a type of historical consciousness made through the “intellectual transformation of natural time into human time”, understanding natural time as contingent events and human time as human representations of life itself.
Few are able to see in their own representations distortions of the truth, interpretations and repressed feelings that do not “clear” the conscience, this seen in a civilizing panorama transforms authoritarian, inhuman and destructive concepts into obscurity of the conscience, not to use the Greek alethéia again.
Civilization and the Glade
07
Mar
The merit of Heidegger having written about the clearing in the midst of the period post world
wars was that of returning to contemplate what was essentially obscured: The Being, not just the human being, since his Letters on Humanism was polemicized by Peter Sloterdijk (much later), but mainly for returning to the question of the Life of Being.
The Heideggerian reading says: “”Destiny appropriates itself as the clearing of being, which is, as clearing. It is the clearing that grants the proximity of being. without him being able to experience and assume this dwelling today” (in Cartas sobre o Humanismo, 1967).
This clearing is different from any idea about modernity, such as enlightenment or some mystical process of enlightenment, says Heidegger: “”… , nor with regard to the thing that is expressed with the adjective luminous’, which means ‘clear'”, in another of his writings on the task of thinking.
The idea of “Being”, the fact that we are and that death and war hide is once again important in the midst of war threats (see our previous post), thinking and the desire for political and social transformation cannot be allowed to submerge. this true purpose, which is the life of the Self.
This open free means that we can, faced with a situation of denial of Being, have a vision of what is ex-sistent, not as enlightenment, but as a real vision of what is in our presence, in Greek philosophy our “on”.
It is not a question of revelation, but of “unveiling”, that is, something that is always present in us, but hidden and almost dormant, returning to Parmenides’ reading of Being, Heidegger wrote: “As long as being prevails, from the aletheia, the self-revealing emergence belongs to him. (a-lethe).
Growing barbarism is not only the result of emerging social issues or territorial political disputes, but of the concealment of the Being.
HEIDEGGER, Martin.(1967) Carta sobre o humanismo (Letters on Humanism). Brazil, Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, p. 61.
Power in the current conception: finitude
22
Feb
Undoubtedly one of the most enlightening books on the issue of power was written by Byung
Chul Han, not only because it is in the current context but also because of the excellent philosophical review it does.
Although he passes through several other authors: Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger and Lehmann, among others, it is his opposition to Foucault that establishes the best relationship, his psychopolitics is opposed to Foucault’s biopolitics, there is no doubt that today’s society (through media propaganda) ) strong pressure.
However, at the beginning of the book he uses a definition by Max Weber that I think is more accurate, and develops it like this: “power means the opportunity, within a social relationship, to impose one’s will also against resistance, not important on which such opportunity is based” (Han, 2019. 22, quote from Weber’s Economics and Society).
After this, he concludes that the concept of power is sociologically “amorphous”, so he replaces it with the concept of “domination” (we already posted something about this here), which is “obedience to an order, which is sociologically “more precise”.
However, it will be when the concept of “spatial” (or territorial) and “temporal” (a mandate for a certain time) is recovered, that in fact this precision is, in our view, really achieved.
To enter the question of power from the point of view of religion, he takes it from Hegel, and what he considers as “spirit”, and which in the philosopher’s conception is totally dominated by the question of power: “God is power” (pp. 121), and what defines as spirit is nothing other than human subjectivity (comes from idealist dualism) and thus is also enclosed within the finitude of man himself, there is nothing beyond and greater than time-spatial finitude human.
Hegel says that religion is based “on the desire for an absence of limits, for an infinity that, however, would not be infinite power” (p. 123), and what removes the sin of ignorance from him is that he affirms, saying of its true limits is not an unlimited will to power: “Religion is fundamentally profoundly peaceful. She is kindness” (p. 124).
However, he sees this as a “pure concentration of power”, when it is the opposite, remind several biblical readings “Remember that you are dust and to dust we shall return” (Genesis 3,19) and so it is not difficult to see that God made man of clay (of course, they were metabolic structures capable of duplication, but water is a vital element) and it is not difficult to know that when we return to another physical plane we return to inorganic dust.
Ash Wednesday, in the Christian rite, is to remember this human finitude and to humble the power that man thinks he has, he will always be finite and spatial.
Han, Byung-Chul. (2018) What is power?. NY; Wiley. (2019 portuguese version)
What is fair, how did this concept develop
07
Feb
All contemporary tension involves something beyond politics and economics, the tension
over the conception of social contract and power.
The concept of justice is linked to modernity by Contractualism, through construction from the thought of Thomas Hobbes through John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, they take man out of his natural state and exercise him to live in society, they will differ in this way on the concept of who man is: evil by nature and must live under guardianship, he is influenced by society and develops in it, or he is a “noble savage” that society corrupts.
The set of natural rights and the theory of the state of nature is what is called jusnaturalism, whose problem is that the state of equal rights generates conflicts and the state must arbitrate, but in modern society it is together with the liberal utilitarian thought .
Thus, they are all linked to a social contract established by the state, and the first major criticism is made by Hegel, which he will understand by general will is a pure, idealistic concept, maintained in a rational instance, above any agreement or contract.
Max Weber will make a deeper reform by differentiating domination from power, since domination is the acceptance of power that can be given in three ways: legal, traditional and charismatic. However, in none of them the use of force is dispensed with and the social question is not always remembered.
John Rawls develops and re-elaborates a Theory of Justice based on classical contractualism, determining the rights and duties that must be carried out in order to carry out the so-called “cooperation of peoples” and offers contributions to the social issue that is a source of conflicts.
However, current theorists such as Emmanuel Levinas and Martha Nussbaum, question each one in their own way, if the social contract does not have a serious limitation, Nussbaum points out, for example, the problem of people with mental or physical disabilities, the problem on the issue of animals and forests.
Levinas starts from the ethical requirement that exists in Rawls’s work to elaborate the idea that we must refuse the temptation to impose our will and strive to establish peaceful compromises, and thus rejects the idea of the state as having a monopoly on violence and power, in a certain way. sense, it also re-elaborates the issue of domination and power, central to Max Weber.
Lévinas, E., Humanisme de l’Autre Homme, (1973) (Montpellier : Fata Morgana, 1972).
Being, consciousness and clearing
03
Feb
The clearing of Being was an important theme in Heidegger’s ontological resumption, it
is inseparable from the phenomenological methodology which his teacher Husserl was the main modern developer, but it remains an aporia, as stated in Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectics of Enlightenment, if there is in fact a self-destruction of enlightenment in modernity and why this happened.
Therefore, it is not simply a matter of resuming the Being, but as this can happen from the phenomenological method, then two questions must be raised: placing our preconceptions in parentheses as a result of enlightenment, which is called by Husserl the epoché phenomenological, and the question of the intentionality of consciousness, in it the Being is unveiled, there reside most of our problems and dissatisfaction.
Contemporary culture (or what’s left of it, as Dalrymple says, we’ve already posted here) goes against the grain in this sense, what some authors call an excess of positivity, that logic described even as “mystery”, affirmation of desires and needs, summarizing life seen as utility only and not as essence or fullness.
In this way, we must make an “emptiness”, a silence in the soul so that we have the fullness of the being, remove the immediate desires and needs in order to be able to understand in fact the true needs and nourishment of the Being that lead to joy and fullness, the simple impulse leads to temporary compulsions and as such satisfy only the immediate need, what is proper to the Being remains hidden.
It is possible with these two measures: to make a void (epoché) by putting in parentheses what our preconceptions are, re-elaborating them in a hermeneutic circle that actually allows a new “concept”, after the fusion of horizons.
This is why ontology says that the Being remains hidden, it is beyond what is immediate and apparent, it should not be sought “Outside”, but “Inside”, true interiority is needed, without manipulations and barriers, many thinkers, mystics and spiritualities manage to this, and reach a fullness, even if temporary, will be food for a true asceticism.
For Christian philosophy and theology, it is not possible to reach true fullness without announcing and living its values, says the reading (Mt 5:14): “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. Nobody lights a lamp and puts it under a bowl, but on a lamp, where it shines for everyone in the house”, but this must be done with respect and fraternity and never with proselytism and judgments.
Being, Truth and Consciousness
02
Feb
It is not by chance that when we are faced with the greatest technical development of humanity,
the current development of Artificial Intelligence that threatens to invade the universe of all things (the IoT is just a detail of this), we are also faced with the question of what it is consciousness.
From the truth of classical antiquity, Alethéia (a-létheia) is to reveal what is hidden, passing through countless authors until arriving at the Frankfurt School where Adorno and Horkheimer who speaks of the aporia of enlightenment, the one who at the beginning of modernity seeks to obtain a “objective” truth that conceals being.
In this question of truth, Heidegger, who develops the question of the forgetfulness of Being and the concealment of truth, developed it as: “in the following sentence where one writes about ‘truth’, it is evident that the representation of the essence of truth dictated by some modern manual of epistemology, leaving unchanged and untouched the essence of aletheia” (Heidegger, 1998, p. 115), says the author about authors who are trapped only in the etymology of the word.
The Frankfurtians, on the other hand, describe the issue of enlightenment as follows: “The aporia we face in our work thus reveals itself as the first object to be investigated: the self-destruction of enlightenment. We have no doubt – and this is where our petitio principii lies – that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightening thought” (Adorno & Horkeimer, 1947) which they reduce to a small principle, since they do not see the question of Being as central.
When questioning what is consciousness, or what is sentience in the matter of Artificial Intelligence, we are not questioning anything other than what separates us from things, ultimately what is Being and if in fact it only has meaning of “object” that modern enlightenment wanted to give us.
We are also faced with ethical and moral principles when “unveiling” (a-lethéia, non-hidden) the question of Being, resuming it is not just an exercise in the etymology of the word truth or a philosophical exercise, it is first of all to do an essential question, a lato principii: “what is being” and what is hidden.
The possibility of the clearing is none other than the one that puts us not before the truth logically development, for onto-logically, and from there to define what is conscience, developed by Heidegger in the following way: “consciousness is the appeal of the preoccupation from the estrangement of being in the world that awakens Dasein to its own power to be guilty” (Heidegger, 2012, p. 791).
The question remains if it is possible for all beings, and for the current modern man, a “awareness” that reveals within itself as an enlightenment of consciousness, beyond hatred, polarization, intolerance and the narratives that hide the truth of Being.
Turning to fortune tellers, self-help, does not make the wheel of history and truth go backwards, we walk in the dark, in concealment and not in the awareness of Being.
ADORNO, T. W. T. W. & Horkheimer, M. Dialética do Esclarecimento, 1947.
HEIDEGGER, Martin. Heráclito. Trad. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 1998.
______, Ser e Tempo (edição em alemão e português). Trad. de Fausto Castilho. Campinas: Unicamp; Petrópolis: Rio de Janeiro, 2012.
The idealist crisis and the ontological recovery
01
Feb
The evolution of the Enlightenment in both politics and economics culminated in Hegelianism,
after passing through Kant’s critique of reason, it is the last great theory that seeks to realize an “integrated” totality, subject to “dialectical” contradictions (it is different from the dialectic of classical antiquity) and, according to his model, the ultimate aim would be to reach the full spiritual essence, which has little or nothing to do with religiosity.
It was thus the dialectical materialist asceticism that ended in an enormous void and in the “forgetfulness of being”, a term used by Heidegger to contradict the theories that since Descartes have emptied and criticized the metaphysical reading of reality, in the etymology of the word meta-physis, in this case the Greek, since its origin is from there, according to Aristotle it was the first science, it gave solid knowledge about things, and the study is confused with ontology, the “being as being”.
For Kant this study is confused with that of customs, it is a non-empirical or rational knowledge, his study on morality and “subjectivity” will start from this relationship with cultural customs and here there is already a strong dose of relativism, and deepens the dualism between Subject x Object, forgetting the “Being”.
So that which is subjective, theoretical or metaphysical is falling into disrepute and theories of objectivity, practicality and empirical realism grow, this will not be done without contradiction, but the very definition of idealist dialectic is this, the development of this concept from from yourself.
Plato defined dialectics as the art of thinking, questioning and organizing ideas (Greek eidos – image, we already posted something), so neither theory is out of the question (idealism is also a theory, by the way, not very practical) , neither metaphysics nor “being”.
The theo-ontology of the end of the measured age will establish the relations between the entity and the being, according to Thomas Aquinas he “is infinite. Therefore, if it becomes finite, it must be limited by something, which has the capacity to receive it, that is, by the essence”, present in his thesis “The entity and the essence”.
Amidst the crisis of idealist thought, see the previous post, a new current emerges from Franz-Brentano in the mid-nineteenth century, which resumes phenomenology and ontology working on the intentionality of human consciousness, which was a specific study in Thomas Aquinas, to try to describe, understand and interpret the phenomena as they appear to perception.
Brentano was Husserl’s teacher, who rereads Descartes and Kant, and elaborates phenomenology with a different meaning given by his teacher Brentano, seeks to separate what is empirical, so the phenomenon of the mental act is not something that appears instantly in the mind, but depends on the memory and elaborates from there the concepts of protension and retension, the discussion about what is consciousness today reaches the objects of Artificial Intelligence.
Heidegger was a student of Husserl, and from him one can consider both the linguistic turn (not all authors agree) and the ontological resumption.
The Lights of Enlightenment
31
Jan
We still live under the aegis of the Enlightenment, the strong movement of 18th century
Europe, its principles seemed to lead to a perfect society speaking of freedom and equality among human beings, wishing to abolish both the powers of realization and the influence of Christian religiosity, Voltaire and Diderot were the most radical thinkers, but you can’t help but feel the influences of Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, David Hume and Montesquieu.
Ernest Cassirer makes one of the important treatises on the Enlightenment, quotes Diderot: “The Author of nature, who will not reward me for having been a man of spirit, will not condemn me to eternal punishment for having been a fool” (apud Cassirer, 1992, p. 224), but the author corrects both the aspect of tolerance, it is necessary to remember the wars between Lutherans and Catholics involving different reigns and the peace of Westphalia, and the aspect now of a free religiosity that “is no longer a gift of a supernatural power, of divine grace; it must spring from the action itself and receive its essential determinations from the action” (Cassirer, p. 225).
The idea also developed by Cassirer of a “pure” intellectualism, on the one hand puts a primacy of thought over pure theoretical speculation and on the other hand seeks to found a religion “in the pure limits of simple reason”, of course without faith, without the mystery (which is part of nature) is no longer religion.
Cartesian insufficiency and reductionism, a strong argument of Cassirer to the Enlightenment, made several philosophers seek roots in Eastern philosophy, Cassirer reminds Leibniz that he had already “quoted Chinese civilization” and in the Persian Letters, Montesquieu makes a comparison between East and West, but it will be Schopenhauer (Upanishad) and Nietzsche (Zaratrusta) who, under these eastern influences, will break with Enlightenment philosophy.
Leibniz is not directly contested, but his disciple Wilhelm Wolff, who “celebrates Confucius as a prophet of great moral purity and places him on a par with Christ” (Cassirer, p.226), will be the target of Voltaire’s irony in his famous “Candido, or optimism” (1759), criticizes the idea of “the best of all possible worlds”.
In the economic aspect, it was important to overcome the philosophy of mercantilism and develop liberal theory (especially Ada, m Smith) on the concept of the economy of nations, but liberalism will develop more broadly with the idea of financial capital by David Ricardo (1772-1823).
The civilizational crisis that we pointed out in last week’s posts (and previous ones, of course), has its roots in the Enlightenment and its ideas of state, religion and freedom, but as Cassirer points out, it is important to “reject the literal meaning of the Bible every time it is mentioned. finds expressed the obligation of an act that contradicts the elementary principles of morality” (p. 228), but in his Treatise on Tolerance (1763), a law of the intellectual world is traced “that reason only exists and subsists if it is recreated day after day” (p. 229).
Cassirer’s development however is that “one cannot decide on their point value apart from their moral efficacy. This is Lessing’s meaning of the apologue of the ring: the ultimate and profound truth of religion is only proved from within” (p. 230).
For these philosophers, only objectivity (the relationship with the external object) is knowledge, and this is achieved in a “transcendence” of the subject in relation to the object, thus there is no sense or value in a moral asceticism, thus for them religion is religion. natural, although they do not have a good relationship with nature.
CASSIRER, Ernest. (1992) A filosofia do Iluminismo (The Philosophy of the Enlightenment). Trans. Alvaro Cabral. Brazil, Campinas, SP: Editora da Unicamp.
One year of war and three of pandemic
23
Jan
On December 31, 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) was alerted about cases of
pneumonia in the city of Wuhan in China, in Brazil although there were cases without a precise diagnosis, I remember a case that was reported in Minas Gerais, only in On March 11th, when the WHO characterized the situation as a “pandemic”, it started a combat process in Brazil.
Accurate data is lacking, however WHO continues to talk about advancing numbers and the Kraken variant (other is Othrus, CH.1.1, appear in England) and China has had records of infections.
For those who don’t remember, March 11, 2011 was also the date of a tsunami that affected the Fukushima plant (in the photo the tsunami in Minamisoma, Japan), just to remind you that both natural disasters and those of a war can affect the 447 reactors nuclear weapons in operation in 30 countries (according to data from the WNA, World Nuclear Association), in addition to the nuclear weapons that are growing all over the world.
In a meeting at the Ramstein military air base in Germany, members of the EU, Canada, Japan, USA, and among Latin American countries, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay, signed their support for Ukraine. Brazil did not sign.
The request for sending Leopard tanks, the most advanced and manufactured in Germany, has not been decided, Finland will be able to send 200 units that it has of this type of military vehicle, the next meeting will include the sending of 4th fighters. Generation, Russia has the powerful MIg-31 with strike and aircraft intercept capability in combat.
The warnings should be seriously discussed by those who claim to fight for life and peace, the use of rhetoric no longer works due to social media, at all times election campaign lies and populist statements are confronted with an increasingly warlike reality.
