Arquivo para a ‘Método e Verdade Científica’ Categoria
A significant milestone for this blog
01
Mar
In February, we reached a milestone of 
almost two thousand hits a day on our content, 55,980 in total. If we had just 20 more hits, we would have reached exactly 56,000, which divided by the 28 days of February would give us 2,000 hits a day.
The main concern of this blog is to maintain a healthy culture of dialogue, respecting the different positions, trying to divert the current polarization without omitting the excesses and outbursts of hatred and bravery that characterize the contemporary world and without forgetting good culture.
We don’t omit our Christian vision, which in our view should be one of dialogue and respect for all other cultures, ecumenism with other religions and the defense of life, greater social justice and the reaffirmation of scientific culture, without forgetting that it depends on method and not opting for the current polarization that distorts true scientific knowledge, ignores original cultures and other peoples who have their own culture in their development.
I would also clarify that our vision of Christianity involves true spirituality and recognizes a culture confused about its true roots: solidarity, humanitarianism and empathy between peoples. Fundamentalism has nothing to do with orthodoxy, which recognizes as theological values: charity (infuse), true hope (Psalm 146:5, Jeremiah 17:7,8, Ephesians: 1, 18) and true faith that believes in the historical and divine truth of Jesus.
We will never deny science and good culture, remembering that they need method and good storytelling, a theme that is almost always present in our analysis of today’s society and culture.
But our central concern in the contemporary world is peace, empathy and justice.
Thank you to my readers, especially those who, while disagreeing, keep the dialog going!!!
Delay and the meaning of life
25
Feb
Just like any appreciation of art, any
narration that is not a fragmented narrative, requires a sense of appreciation, sensitivity and empathy and this means a delay in the time of view, Byung-Chul Han wrote: “the world is loaded with meaning. The gods are nothing more than bearers of meaning” (Han, 2016, p. 25), I’m not looking at life as a pantheist here, but dialoguing with any possibility of contemplation.
The masters of contemplation were masters of taking their time and “appreciating” life (read Vita Contemplativa by Byung-Chul Han), for this appreciation we must go against the current world where “narrative creates the world of nothingness” (p. 25).
Han reveals the relationship we have with the senses today: “Here [and now] everything has meaning is the eternal repetition of the same, the reproduction of what has already been, of the imperishable truth. This is how prehistoric man lives with a present that lasts” (Han, 2016, p. 26), a present that is not an update but a repetition, which is why there is confusion with the virtual, which in the etymological sense of the word is that which is already potential, and not the same.
Its deeper meaning also reveals the post-truth: “time will be defactified (defaktiziert) and, at the same time, denaturalized (entnaturalisier) (Han, 2016, p. 28) and the revolution today refers to a defactified time, i.e. a return to previous models that do not correspond to current problems and realities, which is why it is necessary to falsify it.
Byung-Chul separates the time of orality from history by understanding “the mythical that functions as an image”, and sees the history of the Gutenberg galaxy as one that “gives way to information” (Han, 2016, p. 30), to give it an unprecedented definition: “in reality, information presents another paradigm. Within it dwells another very different temporality. It is a manifestation of atomized time, of a time of points (Punkt-zeit)” (Han, 2016, p. 31), without having read Stephen Hawking’s ‘information paradox’ as a prediction of ‘energies’ escaping from the black hole.
It is necessary to separate the cosmological reality of this information, the megatelescope James Webb detected these “energies” from the reality of atomized and fragmented information, there is no contextualization of thought, its etymology and its contextual meaning, a world of denaturalized “information” as Han points out.
All this isn’t philosophy, it’s the daily information consumption of haters, opposed to the culture of peoples and nations, due to its fragmentation and the lack of a meaningful narrative.
That’s why anxiety, the consumption of low-level information, isn’t just disinformation, because those who proclaim it don’t look for the etymological, social roots of the thoughts they have constructed and which can make sense of them.
*defatikiziert: could be translated as in-fact, but the translator was careful to change it (de is “not”).
Han, Byung-Chul. (2016) O Aroma do Tempo: um ensaio Filosófico sobre a Arte da Demora, Lisbon. Ed. Relógio d´Água.
Pain today
21
Feb
This is the subtitle of the book: “The Palliative
Society: Pain Today” by Byung-Chul Han, which outlines the new control that reigns over minds: “Be happy is the new formula of domination” (p. 26).
It’s not just rulers or local authorities who proclaim this, churches and coaches also promise this, they are the new sellers of illusion, parents want to prevent their children from frustration and difficulties: “my child won’t go through what I went through”, “I want to give them every assistance and comfort”, but life is made up of frustrations, obstacles and setbacks.
Positive psychology wants to avoid any change: “not revolutionaries, but motivation trainers take the stage, and take care that no discontent [Unmut] arises, but no anger [Mut]” and Byung-Chul Han recalls a relevant historical fact: “On the eve of the world economic crisis in the 1920s, with its extreme social oppositions, there were many workers’ representatives and radical activists who denounced the excess of the rich and the misery of the poor” (pg. 28). 28), pointing out that the word “mut” in German is also courage, so as not to confuse the translation anger with hatred.
He reminds us that “social media and computer games also act as anesthetics” (p. 29), asking a young man why he uses computers so much, he replied “I relax”, but this is the counterpoint to a society of anxious, immediate, depressed and self-centered people.
The essence of this type of “happiness” is objectification: to buy a new piece of furniture, a new car, to change their house, to have an advanced cell phone and, for the poorest, a pair of branded sneakers or a designer shirt; if this is impossible, they will choose idols that embody “thinghood”.
While “true happiness is only possible if it is broken. It is precisely pain that protects happiness from objectification. Pain carries happiness. Painful happiness is not an oxymoron. All intensity is painful. Passion links pain to happiness” (Han, 2021, p. 31).
And there is no greater pain than giving oneself to others, George Bernanos wrote: “Knowing how to find joy in the joy of others is the secret of happiness, French writer and journalist at the beginning of the 20th century, he was a soldier in the French resistance in the Second World War and wrote ‘France against robots’ and ‘Dialogues of the Carmelites’ which is a kind of ‘reverse mysticism’.
For the Greeks, the good life was not a state, but a continuous quest, which they defined as happiness, but they did not abandon contemplation, wisdom and reason in order to live well.
“The society of survival loses all meaning for the good life. Even enjoyment [Genuss] is sacrificed to health elevated to an end in itself” (pg. 34), so what it actually leads to is a painful life of striving for survival, at least for the average person, although of course there are exploiters, millionaires and the powerful who also eagerly seek profit and a ‘happier’ survival.
Han, B.-C. (2021) A Sociedade Paliativa: a dor hoje. Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: Editora Vozes.
The third included and the counterpoint to the crisis
19
Feb
It is no longer the Copernican and
Newtonian models that explain the universe, the center of the galaxy has a black hole, whose laws of operation still challenge astrophysics and even quantum physics, the simple operation by mechanical laws described at the beginning of modern science have already fallen apart, although mechanistic reasoning has a social survival.
Philosophy has already returned to the question of Being and essence, although the majority of dialogues and articles still discuss empiricist science and the idealism of Parmenides (460 BC – 530 BC), according to Popper, he and Xenophanes made a pre-project of modern enlightenment (The World of Parmenides: Essays on Pre-Socratic Enlightenment, Karl Popper), the Renaissance tried to return to Greek originality.
For Popper, both the Critical Science that Aristotle had built, as well as the philosophy of nature and the theory of nature, the great original attempts at cosmology collapsed after Aristotle, and the modern age, starting with Newton, formulates a physics that modifies part of the cosmological vision, But quantum physics and the theory of relativity destroy this model and go beyond the idealist/Enlightenment model of the logic of non-contradiction (Being is and non-being is not), creating a third included (the logic of Stéphane Lupasco and the physics of Barsarab Nicolescu).
They create new paradigms by changing the model of absolute time and space (which is now relative) and understanding quantum states of particles, discovering tunneling (a third state between quantum particles) and wormholes (non-absolute spaces that can open up in the movement of celestial bodies), see the movie Contact from Carl Sagan’s novel of the same name.
The Aristotelian logic that justified a third term has collapsed and with it the Manichean, scientific and fundamentalist logics, a clearing is opening up, larger than Heidegger would have imagined in his “Forest Paths”.
The meaning of the clearing in Heidegger’s Dasein (being-there) is a metaphor for an opening in the forest that symbolizes human experience, a static field (figure above) where we move and try to see this experience clearly (image ‘Plan Générique’ by Fotis Ifantidis).
The great clearing promises to open up in a world of conflicts of all kinds, which will at some point have a “broad” light, science itself will see the serious epistemological divergences, from an archaic scientism to pure philosophical speculation, which hides under the idea of science, which ignores the true transcendence (not the scientific one) of humanity.
The root of the social crisis is revealed within the ancient frameworks of scientific, religious and political fundamentalism, it will need to create an even greater crisis that will make humanity wake up from its idealist/Enlightenment slumber and turn towards the good (see previous post) and flee from narratives.
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Evil and truth
07
Feb
When Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) 
broke with Manichaeism (the division between good and evil), he became a Christian and, in order to solve his main problem, he saw that evil is the absence of good and therefore the absence of Truth.
Based on Augustine’s model, evil for Leibniz established the foundations by which a world with evil brings more good and therefore a world without evil is better, in his Monadology he established: “an imperfection in the part may be necessary for a perfection in the whole” and therefore the parts depend on the whole for the (rational) truth as he conceived it.
Leibniz (1646-1716) was influenced by Augustine, and 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 of contemporary narratives.
This is the key to establishing the virtues, which are capable of exercising the moral good, and from this stems the public good. The current social problem is not just due to the search for the common good, it is necessary for it to be growing and sustainable for there to be moral virtues.
Thus, there is no justification for theft or small deviations, as biblical wisdom says: “he who is not faithful in little is not faithful in much” (Luke 17:10-11), and a permissive society cannot bear fruit for the construction of the common good and the public good.
The problem of truth, is established by the method in the Phenomenology, the German philosopher Husserl (1859-1938) will say that truth occurs through phenomena that are observable, perceptible and sensitive: “we call this phenomenology”, so truth has a method that can be observed in everything that happens around us.
Moral relativism makes truth something linked to the morals of that group. In the previous post, we recalled that it was first dealt with in Plato’s book Theaetetus, whose central concern was to combat the Sophists and create a true citizenry; in general, the book is a rejection of theses that manifest some form of mixture between reason and sensation.
We need to defend and take a strong stand on the side of the moral good and for this we need fraternal love, but it cannot be separated from the cardinal virtues.
Language and evil
31
Jan
Human language is as complex as man himself,
so without a vision of Being in its complexity (it is onto-logical) and without an accurate understanding of linguistic functions (see previous post) we make the mistake of understanding that the logic coming from media and devices overrides human logic and can “control” reality.
Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, reinforces the idea that: “language is a garment that disguises thought. And indeed in such a way that one cannot infer from the outer form of the garment the form of the thought clothed in it, because the outer form of the garment has been constituted for purposes entirely different from making the form of the body recognizable” (Wittgenstein, proposition 4002).
This is also true of metalanguage, where the digital media is the garment (not the network, because it is a network of relationships), it is dressed up to omit the purposes for which many people use it, but the problem is not only socio-political, it is also moral and ethical.
This omission in language allows linguistic acts to be carried out with absolute immorality despite “freedom”; it is much more than a simple expression in “clothing”; it is a way of corrupting and destroying core values of the civilizing process.
Separating what is good from what is evil based on the garment is also a tricky task, as one cannot make common mistakes: preventing free expression, discerning the intentions hidden in the “garment” and, above all, to discern the intentions hidden in the “garment” and above all to defend the “foundations” of truth.
Truth is ontological and does not follow common logic, it aims to respect the being, their dignity as a person, the right to basic freedoms and especially the right to life, today under a rather confusing “garb” of rights to death, where war and exclusion are the main ones.
Language itself, as an everyday expression of communication, is being abused and deteriorated more and more every day, to the point of making it difficult to even achieve what was already the achievement of millennia of civilization: communication between two people and in narrative´s time the evil is more present in bad communication.
You can’t separate the evil that lies under the guise of “words” and linguistic use, without paying attention to structural truths that date back millennia in the civilization process: the right to Be (life), the right to freely express one’s ideas and principles, the right to come and go and the right to make choices that don’t harm these rights of each Other.
You don’t get good from evil, and what is present in language must be purified.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (2023) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Brazil: Criciúma, SC: Editora Convivium, 1ª. edição eletrônica.
Narrative, language and communication
29
Jan
Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han
says: “Today we live in a post-narrative time. Not narrative [Erzählung], but counting [Zählung] determines our lives.” (Han, 2023, p. 48).
To better understand this sentence, just for didactic purposes we have categorized the literary genre into 3: narrative or epic, lyrical and dramatic, the narrative is linked to the “telling” (zählung) of a story and therefore not should be confused with the actual narratives (Erzählung, in German), see that they are differentiated by the prefix “Er”, so the telling must have a narrator, a plot, the characters in time and space, that is, in a context.
Lyric is also a genre that refers to texts with subjectivity and connotations, they can be in prose or verse, but they are also a different type of storytelling from modern narratives, many authors complain about the lack of poetry, and Heidegger pointed out that this is another function of language.
The dramatic text is also a genre in which acts, scenes, rubrics and lines are presented, so 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.
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 its importance back to the forefront.
The beginning of modernity is marked by the rupture 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, for example: Morse, digital and quantum, where “the code explains the code itself, that is, the language explains the language itself”, and this must 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.
Returning to Byung-Chul Han’s initial quote: “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.
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, where communication itself, the fruit of millennia of evolution in human culture, seems to be in question.
Proclaiming words, stories and beliefs is a universal right, attempts to prevent these rights is not only a motivation for divisions and hatred, it is fuel for wars.
Truth and justice will meet
24
Jan
The encounter between truth and justice still
challenges most thinkers, Hans-Georg Gadamer, in his book Truth and Method, highlights the two points that are still obstacles to this dichotomy: “The effective exemplarity that the new mechanics had and its triumph for The sciences of the 18th century, highlighted by Newton’s celestial mechanics, continued to be so evident to Helmholtz that he was far from asking what philosophical preconditions had enabled the emergence of this new science in the 18th century. XVII” (Gadamer, 1997, p. 42), and points this out as a result of the Occamist School of Paris.
Wiliam Ockham (1276-1347) was a Scottish monk who established the principle of “Ockham’s Razor” which says that between two explanations you should take the more and this reached the studies of the 17th and 18th centuries, and Helmholtz was the one who tried to separate the sciences of nature from their historical derivation, because this way the sciences of the spirit could be worked on.
Gadamer has the merit of unveiling (it is not the unveiling that would be reaching the Truth), when analyzing Dilthey’s historical romanticism: “with regard to this independence of the methods of the sciences of the spirit, Dilthey continues to link it to the ancient “Natura parendo vincitur” “ (Gadamer, 1997, p. 44) and thus Newtonian principles continued to prevail in the “Sciences of the Spirit” and thus the true bases of these sciences remain linked to logicism.
The meaning of the Latin term is “Nature is overcome when giving birth”, it links the natural to the supernatural, and thus ends up denying it, this was Kant’s intention (sapere audi, to dare to know) and which became enshrined in modernity by Hegel: “the real is only an aspect of the ideal”.
In idealism there is no concept of virtue (areté), but of training as a personal discipline, Wilhelm Von Humboldt corrected this: “When we, however, in our language say training, we are referring to something at the same time more intimate , that is, to the nature that comes from the knowledge and feeling of the set of spiritual and moral commitment, to spill harmoniously into sensitivity and character” (Gadamer, 1997, p. 49).
Thus, modernity abolished metaphysics, what is beyond physis (since the Greeks means nature) and the supernatural (that which is above nature, the superno natura).
Thus, in a reductionism of truth, when we seek justice we think it is correct to use half-truths (the means justify the ends) and when we say we defend the Truth, we think it is correct to suppress conditions of human and divine justice to defend it, there is a link between them Justice without Truth is mutilated, Truth without Justice is half-truth
GADAMER, H.G. (1997) Verdade e método. Trad.de Flávio Paulo Meurer. Brazil: Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes.
For a true asceticism
23
Jan
Peter Sloterdijk, despite being an agnostic,
points out a “spiritual” defect in today’s society: it is a “society of exercises” that do not lead to a true inner “ascent”; it is a society of agitation, looking for “efficiency”, the “society of tiredness”.
The lack of time for meditation, for exercising the mind and soul, is leading to “brainrot”, the word of the moment according to Oxford University, which has included it in the dictionary, meaning rotten brain. It’s not just a question of consuming bad information, ignorance and the lack of exercise in a “contemplative life” as Byung Chul Han calls for creates a space in the mind for this type of thinking to grow.
We create a culture that isn’t even counter-culture in the sense of civilizational evolution, it’s just something rotten, we bombard our brains with fragments of thoughts, spiritual fragments without them completing each other and forming within us a true spiritual asceticism.
It’s empty activism, and to fill it we need more narcotics and food to fill the body’s emptiness while the mind remains empty, this same emptiness that could serve to create a “contemplative life” that would support asceticism and a balance in the virtuous circle.
Chul Han also recalls painting, quoting the work of the Frenchman Paul Cézanne: “Painting means nothing more than ‘letting go of the friendship of all these things in the open air’” (Han, 2023, p. 49).
It’s not just media culture that does this, it’s the absence of structural values of virtue and morality.
The loss of culture (or what remains of it according to Antoine Daniels) is this inability to see beauty and truth.
Of course, true asceticism, in the spiritual sense, cannot fail to encounter the divine, and as for useless “exercises” to take a “bath in spirituality” only to come out empty and without encountering being, says Han: “in the deep layers of being, they are suspended” (Han, 2023, p. 49).
It’s not just media culture that does this, it’s the absence of structural values of virtue and morality.
“The landscape of inactivity,” writes Byung Chul-Han about Cézanne, ‘breaks with nature made human and restores a non-humanized order of things in which they can meet’ (Han, p. 50).
Still quoting Cézanne: “Ah! Landscape has never been painted. The human being must not be there, but must have found himself entirely in the landscape” (p. 51), the ‘noisy self’ must be ‘silenced’.
How many people participate in the “exercise society” just to laugh and get emotional, without having “entered the landscape”, without the slightest contact with the divine, needing noise, food and drink to fill the emptiness they have in their souls and not in their stomachs?
Only an exercise in true asceticism can lead us to Love, the synthesis of the virtues, but without forgetting them: it introduces us to balance, courage, listening and sincere social relationships.
HAN, B. C. Vita Contemplativa (Vita Contemplativa: or on inactivity). Trad. By Lucas Machado. Brazil. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 2023.
Voices in the desert
10
Jan
In times of crisis there are a small number of 
voices that see beyond the clashing forces, neither the apocalyptic nor the integrated (as Umberto Eco would say), but those who understand the panorama and the roots of the temporal crises and go beyond the temporal, they see the divine civilization.
Dostoevsky’s figure of the idiot is one of these figures who saw a crisis in the society of the time, a decadent feudalism in Russia, and imagined a society with ethics and morals, not just a structural change, but a change in the way of seeing society and the Other.
The integrated people who live under the dominion of ideas that have already been proven to be outdated, almost all of which come from European idealism, which imagined an eternal peace (Kant) without understanding the basis of the conflicts, which was a vision of a warlike and intercessory state in everyday life.
David Flusser’s analysis of the social situation at the time of Jesus in the first century of the Christian era is also similar. His book Jesus deals with the social, political and religious conflicts of the time, and as a Jew he paints a visionary picture of Jesus at the time.
A true prophecy was coming true, and the prophet Isaiah spoke well before that time about a prophet who would come (the last and the greatest, therefore true) according to Mark (Mk 1:2-3): “Behold, I am sending my messenger ahead of you to prepare your way. This is the voice of him who cries out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his highways straight! “.
John the Baptist was the “idiot” of his time, few understood clearly what he was saying about the coming of the Messiah, some wanted to interpret him politically as a warrior-savior and others as a madman who lived in the desert feeding on honey and locusts.
The religious and apocalyptic people of our time are incapable of understanding him and that’s why they are Pharisees and false prophets. In the midst of a crisis, they announce riches and abundance that are unattainable for the simple people who are exploited by them.
Saviors of the homeland are different from saviors who prepare a divine path for a post-war, post-crisis, post-religious warmongering future and from “partners” (in reference to Paul Ricoeur mentioned in previous posts), we need a worldview that clearly sees the cardinal virtues and does not separate justice and wisdom from them).
