Arquivo para a ‘Calm Technology’ Categoria
Vita Activa and disposition
11
Apr
Laziness has been treated as a defect for centuries (sometimes unfairly, like
accusing unemployed people of “loafing”), today it’s called procrastination, at its limit it’s led to Burnout Syndrome or Panic Syndrome (they’re different), but both are the result of an exaggerated dose of pressure, stress or work.
International associations already recognize it as a phenomenon that affects health, and the number is much higher than those registered because there is fear of losing one’s job, credibility and isolation.
It is therefore necessary to characterize what phenomenology calls intentionality, using a category that was introduced by Heidegger as disposition, as “a state of mind that precedes any intentionality directed towards an object”, quoting Heidegger: “Disposition has, however, already opened up being-in-the-world as a whole, and first makes it possible to direct oneself towards [something]” (Han, 2023, p. 66).
Thus the disposition is necessary, says Han: “we cannot dispose of the disposition”, “the disposition then constitutes the pre-reflexive framework for activities and actions”, thus, it “can facilitate or prevent de-fined actions” (p. 67).
This framework of thought “is not pure activity and spontaneity” … “the contemplative dimension inhabits it … transforms it into a correspondent“ (idem), this is outlined in Han’s thought at the beginning of this page as an ”originary ontological passivity”.
Not activity, “but being launched” [Geworfenheit] defines this ontological originary, as being-in-the-world originary, for this being to correspond means to that which “addresses us as the voice [Stimme] of being” (p. 67), so listening and listening attentively precedes action and gives rise to disposition.
The correspondent listens to the voice of the call […] it is always necessary … not just by chance and sometimes a disposition [gestimmtes]“, ”the speaking of the correspondent receives its precision” … “rather, it gives the thought a de-finition” (Han, 2023, p. 68).
Thus, action requires, in order of precedence, a call (a voice), a disposition and an intention, and they correspond to a de-defined thought.
By not acting on the thought, we are driven against our previous inertia, our inactivity is not put into action, there is no disposition for it and it creates a conflict in our being.
Han compares it to the inactivity of the machine, which never precedes contemplation, nothing comes of it when it is stationary, it is an inactivity without any action, it is its absence.
If we are driven like machines, without disposition, we face wear and tear in our being-in-the-world, “thinking is always receiving”, hence its in-disposition, its disorder.
Without listening to the voice of our Being, without contemplating, action is machinelike, often difficult and tiring; if it is thought out and paused, it is sure, decisive and achieves true purposes.
Han, B.-C. (2023) Vita Contemplativa Ou sobre a inatividade. Transl. Lucas Machado, Brazil, Petrópolis: RJ.
About the movie Virgin Mary
12
Dec
The first important observation about the
film Virgin Mary, directed by D. J. Caruso (he was also the director of Love of Redemption) and scripted by Timothy Michael Hayes, is that it is not a theological biblical narrative and therefore cannot be seen as an apology for Mary, mother of Jesus (more than 11 million views already).
Virgin Mary portrays the faith and courage of Mary and Joseph, fleeing to Egypt to save the newborn Jesus in the persecution that King Herod, played by Anthony Hopkins, inflicts on all newborns when he learns that the Messiah promised to the Jewish people has been born.
The speculations about Mary’s childhood and attitudes cannot be seen in the light of the biblical narrative either, but it is important to note that she is not ignored and is venerated in the Bible, both by the angel Gabriel, and if anyone doubts Mary’s importance, just read chapter 1 of Luke, one of the longest, it is all about the birth of Jesus, but especially verses 42-43 (there are several translations) where her cousin Elizabeth greets her: “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. Where does this honor come from, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”.
Having cleared up the problem of the biblical narrative where there is no doubt about Mary’s importance in salvation history, let’s move on to the secular criticisms of the film, curiously one of which is Joseph’s age, even though we find the narrative about him being old, it’s not clear either from a cultural point of view (what was old at the time would probably be old) or from a cultural point of view, although we find the narrative about being old, it’s not clear either from a cultural point of view (what was old at the time was probably between 30 and 40) or from a religious point of view, there is no biblical reference, it’s just a tradition.
The choice of Maria, actress Noa Cohen, has also been criticized for being Israeli, due to the current political climate, but the director clarified that the choice, among several interviews, was immediate and it should be noted that Noa’s darker skin tone was predominant at the time of Jesus.
The idea of deconstructing the biblical narrative because of the nationality of the characters goes far beyond the problem of today’s war, which is undoubtedly cruel because it affects people and not the political, religious or ideological issues that are involved – this was the stance of both the Roman Empire and the Pharisees, the false religionists of that time.
As it’s a fictional movie, the critics should focus on the actors’ performances, the costumes and the plot. I personally liked the movie, but I believe that the religious problems with Mary and the political ones can hinder the appreciation of an artistic work.
Conserving/revolutionizing and resisting
25
Oct
What to do if the crisis of civilization reaches
human limits and continues to humanize itself ?
Edgar Morin’s answer can be found in chapter 4 of the book Earth-Land when he sets out “Our terrestrial goals”, where he states: “Awareness of our terrestrial roots and our planetary destiny is a necessary condition for realizing humanity and civilizing the Earth” (Morin, 2003, p. 99), and stresses that the former is conservative and neglects “deliberately here the adjective ‘revolutionary’, which has become reactionary and very tainted with barbarism” (idem) and it is enough to see the atrocities of the escalation of current wars.
Conservative because “it is a question of preserving, of safeguarding not only the cultural and natural diversities degraded by inexorable processes of standardization and destruction, not only the civilizational conquests threatened by the returns and manifestations of barbarism” (idem p. 99) we cannot regress in the civilizational milestones we have already reached, but we must evolve.
It’s a paradox, but a justifiable one: “Conservation needs the revolution that would ensure the pursuit of hominization” (Morin, 2003, p. 100) where the paradox “apparently contradictory, conserve/revolutionize: it is the paradox progress/resist” (idem), where resisting is “being on the defensive on all fronts against the returns and manifestations of the great barbarism, written before the new millennium, this is very current in the face of the possibility of war.
To resist, for the author, is to oppose two growing barbarities: the “hateful cruelty” that expresses itself “in murder, torture, individual and collective rages” and the “anonymous cruelty that comes from the techno-bureaucratic barbarity” of assumed or presumed totalitarian states.
Thus, the author, who speaks of “hyper-specialization”, “anonymization, abstraction, commodification, which together lead to the loss not only of the global”, sees the imperative need to resist this mentality, which necessarily leads to barbarism and the process of degradation.
Thus the search “for hominization must be conceived as the development of our psychic, spiritual, ethical, cultural and social potentialities” (p. 101) is part of this paradox of resisting/revolutionizing, so development must be conceived in an anthropological way, i.e. “breaking with the conception of progress as a historical certainty in order to make it an uncertain possibility…” (p. 102).
And he adds that he must “understand that no development is acquired forever: like all living and human things, it suffers the attack of the principle of degradation and needs to be constantly regenerated” (p. 102) and points out the false idea of development, because “: the underdevelopment of the developed increases precisely with their techno-economic development” (p. 104), war and conflict are precisely the “developed”.
Thus the notion of underdevelopment: “however barbaric it may be, it establishes an anthropological link between the so-called developed and the so-called underdeveloped; it encourages useful technical and medical aid – drilling wells, developing energy sources, fighting endemic diseases and nutritional deficiencies – even though it is carried out under conditions of economic exploitation, natural degradation and miserable urbanization that cause new evils” (p. 105).
It is therefore necessary to “tolerate” differences and even establish advantages over them, to no longer ignore or demonize different cultures, to establish aid and agreements for global development and the process of broad humanization, which the author calls “hominization”.
Morin, Edgar Morin & Kern, Anne-Brigitte. (2003) Terra-Patria. Transl. Paulo Azevedo Neves da Silva. Brazil, Porto Alegre : Sulina.
Joy, sacrifice and hope
13
Sep
Pain is part of human reality, and so no joy is
everlasting if it doesn’t understand sacrifice, in the etymology of the word “sacred office”, it’s not exactly pain, as Byung-Chul Han describes in The Palliative Society: pain today, meaningless pain, it’s “bodily affliction”, pain has become a thing, it has lost an ontological and in a way “eschatological” meaning, “meaningless pain is possible only in a bare life emptied of meaning, which no longer narrates”. (Han, 2021, p. 46).
Han cites literary authors such as Paul Valéry, for whom in his book Monsieur Teste “is silent in the face of pain. Pain robs him of speech” (Han, 2021, p. 43), and also Freud, for whom ”pain is a symptom that indicates a blockage in a person’s history. The patient, because of his blockage, is unable to move forward in the story” (p. 45).
It is with the Christian mystic Teresa of Avila, as a kind of counterfigure of pain, “in her, pain is extremely eloquent. The narrative begins with pain. The Christian narrative verbalizes pain and also transforms the body of the mystic into a stage … deepens the relationship with God … produces intimacy, an intensity” (p. 44). For those who don’t know, it was through reading this book that the philosopher Edith Stein, a disciple of Husserl like Heidegger, converted to Christianity.
Sacrifice is the art of living joyfully through pain. Of course, it’s a mistake to think about and desire pain, but if it comes, and someday it will, it can be re-signified as a “sacred office” that is offered. Byung-Chul Han wrote about it: “Suffering is not a symptom, nor is it a diagnosis, but a very complex human experience.” Only great mystics have penetrated it.
In Mark’s Gospel (Mk 9:31), Jesus shocks his disciples by teaching them in secret: “And he said to them, ”The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him. But three days after his death he will rise again,” and then he denies all forms of human power: ‘Whoever wants to be first, let him be servant of all,’ and finally he teaches the simplicity of children: ‘Whoever welcomes one of these children welcomes me,’ is different from what they think today.
Understanding pain, the inverted logic of power and the simplicity and innocence of children is a distant logic in a civilization in crisis, hedonistic, authoritarian and full of malice.
Han, B-C. (2021) A Sociedade paliativa: a dor hoje. Transl. Lucas Machado, Brazil, Petrópolis: ed. Vozes.
What is the universe made of and what is its origin?
30
May
Greek philosophers from the 6th century BC
believed that the four elements of all nature were: fire, earth, water and air, Pythagoras proposed a practically religious school that everything was numbers while Democritus proposed the atom and that they would have rounded, smooth, irregular shapes and smooth, being able to form an infinity of elements, but until the end of the Middle Ages it was believed that fire was composed of one of these particles: the firegist, we owe the chemical table to Dimitri Mendelev who in 1869 organized his chemical elements, previously the alchemist Henning Brad discovered that phosphorus heated with urine residue caused flames and Antoine Lavoisier in 1789 organized some elements into simple, metallic, non-metallic and non-metallic.
Current standard physics has established 7 elements: neutrinos, electron, quarks, photon, graviton, gluon and weak force boson, but there is a more mysterious quantum world that of superstrings, it seems frightening or using the physicists’ word ghostly (Einstein used it the first time realizing that there is a third state in quantum physics in which the element is neither nor is it, later called the Included Third).
The most convincing theory of the universe until recently was that of the Big Bang and an expanding universe, entropy, Stephen Hawking was its great theorist, although this theory already existed before, and thus proposed an “arrow of time” in his most important book. famous “A brief history of time” (1988), but James Webb’s discoveries called into question when he found galaxies and celestial bodies at the edge of the universe that shouldn’t be there, now even the arrow of time is questioned.
The important thing when looking at the universe is to understand where everything came from and whether this whole thing and intelligent life, which for now we only find on our planet Earth, had a beginning and more importantly, had an intention.
The biblical “fiat lux” seems to agree so much with the Big Bang theory, before atoms there were waves or “strings” created in the first 10−44 seconds (Planck time) and then subatomic elements were created, in the case of strings, everything It is initially formed by one-dimensional strings that would be divided into “open” strings (linear) and “closed” strings (in loop strength), vibrating at different frequencies that would give rise not only to the 7 elements, but also the molecules that initiate life.
Be that as it may, there was an initial moment, and the form of this “being” must have been preceded by a creative “being”, the paleontologist and Christian theologian Teilhard Chardin proposed that the entire universe would be the body of this supreme “Being” of the “being”, thus he should have a divine and a material (human) reality, thus he proposed that the universe is Christocentric.
It is not possible for the All to have emerged from nothing, and if there is an original form of the All, of some “element” the physical world is composed, thus there is a “Corpus” of this All, with the difference that He is the creator and all the rest created, but created with some substrate of its own Supreme Being, of course the theory for this is more elaborate, but its understanding is simple, we are part of a body, of a group that communicates, the idea of the individuation of the universe is not plausible, because at the beginning we were one thing: a small cosmic corpuscle, a set of vibrating strings (we could even think of a choir making a song), but there was a moment of creation. and Someone created it.
Power in Foucault and Chul-Han
16
Apr
Michel Foucault broke with the classical
conceptions of the term power and defined it as a network of relationships where all individuals are involved, and we understand the network here with the modern sense of network, although it was vague in his time, individuals are both generators and recipients of power. movement of these relationships, however he identifies them as biopower, while Chul-Han identifies them as psychopower, and in a way adds the media to this.
State ideology, born from Hegel, is the basis of every history of contemporary power, authoritarianism and modern wars were born from a new idea of imperialism and colonialism, in which stronger states control power not only through weapons, but rather through biopower and now psychopower.
Foucault’s biopower, the state is the first level of power (he calls it a sector), the market is the second level, and the third is civil society, the idea of 4th. The power of the press comes from there.
He studied power not to develop a theory about it, but to identify aspects of subjectivity (in ontology it would be the question of Being), that is, subject over other subjects.
This is important to differentiate him from Chul-Han, who starts from the ontological relationships between beings and identifies the action of media and media structures that act on the psychology of power, so his idea of power (What is power) is like a domination technique that stabilizes and reproduces the dominated system through programming and psychological control.
Foucault sees biopower, as in the body as a training machine, since biopolitics, in the middle of the 18th century, was focused on regulatory controls on the population, the idea being that it was the population increase that caused misery and hunger.
Peter Sloterdijk, who supervised Chul-Han’s doctoral thesis on Heidegger, argues that this “training” process failed and thus, the control process develops towards the fourth power, which Chul-Han focuses excessively on the media, forgetting the 4th. power of the press, TV and cinema that had an enormous influence.
He develops pathologies of self-centeredness (narcissism), emotional instability (borderline) as responses to the demands of a society intoxicated with demands for efficiency, appearance and disciplinary coercion, wrote the author):
“The violence of decapitation is inherent to the pre-modern society of sovereignty; its medium is blood. Modern disciplinary society is, to a large extent, a society of negativity, being governed and dominated by disciplinary coercion, that is, by ‘social orthopedics’. Its form of violence is deformation. But neither decapitation nor deformation are capable of describing the postmodern performance society. It is dominated by a violence of positivity, which confuses freedom and coercion. Its pathological manifestation is depression” (Han 2018, pp. 183-184).
HAN, Byung-Chul. (2018) Psicopolítica: o neoliberalismo e as novas técnicas de poder. Brazil, Belo Horizonte: Âyiné.
Fear, society and hope
09
Apr
Fear is not something of these days and perhaps
of contemporary society, it is not, however, something transitory or even impossible to be overcome.
In different societies and thoughts they were elaborated, in ancient classical thought
It is a mistake to think that tiredness, pressure and fear are current problems, they have been present in our society for some time: competition and the demand for perfection are present in the history of humanity.
Heidegger (1889-1976) stated this way (not literal here): fear invites us
living in impropriety, we don’t attribute meaning, we let others and circumstances attribute it, we alienate ourselves from ourselves, we always live on the run, with our schedules full of distractions that occupy us.
For some, it is a more phenomenological and practical way of seeing fear, as Pascal and Kierkegaard would have a more theological fear, but there is a theological mistake “fear of God” is not necessarily a fear, but rather respect, after all the first Christian commandment is to love God above all things.
So seeing fear as a “thing”, the phenomenological sense of Heidegger and others does not suppress the theological vision, a thought limited to man will also limit his existence to this world being a limited intellect.
Kierkegaard’s work “The Concept of Anguish”, remembering that we made a post about this, has a demand for questions, many are asked in relation to the “fear of death”, which in a certain sense is a fragile theological issue, whereas Pascal’s work There is also a tendency to “take a chance on God”, when thinking about the soul.
The philosopher says: “The immortality of the soul is something that worries us so much, that touches us so deeply, that we must have lost all feeling to remain indifferent before it.”, he does not, therefore, affirm its immortality, but rather in the face of doubt.
For Heidegger, it is more than a psychological and ontic phenomenon; it has an ontological dimension, as it refers us to the totality of existence as being-in-the-world, but anguish man only exists if he can have an understanding of Being, although he does not say so, it is a reality beyond “thing”, Hannah Arendt, his disciple, will say beyond the vitta activa.
The contemplative vitta (see also Byung-Chul Han) leads us to awareness of the Being, it is a path to overcoming fear and anguish.
Polycrisis and hope
05
Apr
Rumors of confrontation between Russia and NATO have worsened in the
last few hours, however, the hope for peace and the resistance of the Spirit, as portrayed by Edgar Morin, remain alive.
In addition to Morin’s polycrisis (just as poly is multiple and is also city polis, Krisis also has the meaning of decision-making power) professor Adam Tooze (Financial Times article), of history at Yale University (USA) expanded and updated: pandemics, droughts, floods, mega storms, forest fires, war in Ukraine (and now in the Gaza strip0, energy and food prices, etc.
In his reasoning, without directly pointing out the professor “discovers” the complexity and a new transdisciplinary vision of the “whole”: “A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to deal with it and, thus, threatens our identity. In a multiplicity of crises, the shocks are differentiated, but they interact in such a way that the whole is more ambiguous than the sum of its parts”, he states in the article. (in the image the painting by Tsherin Sherpa (Nepal), Lost Spirits, 2014.)
Morin said: “Linked to the domain of calculation in an increasingly technocratic world, the progress of knowledge is incapable of conceiving the complexity of reality and in particular human realities. The result is a return to dogmatism and fanaticism, and a crisis of morality while hatred and idolatries spread” (Newspaper La Repubblica, interview), however, beyond the polycrisis there are signs of hope.
While the Resistance of the Spirit invokes an understanding of the gravity and issues surrounding the current crisis, Hope (capitalized here) means this Spirit put into action and thus the achievement of a countercurrent spirituality that invokes values of change.
Those who immerse themselves in this Hope in different ways, are always willing to embrace the problems that everyone runs away from, to embrace the fragments of a polarized world, and to remember what unites as opposed to what disunites and polarizes, fortunately there are these spirits and I would call them Spirits of Resistance through Hope.
Go to the World and Bring the Good News, it cannot just be a biblical key, it is Living Hope.
Non-things and subjectivity, the distorted eidos
12
Jan
Subjectivity comes from idealism that judges Being
separate from things, thus only being if projected onto objects, but the Greek “eidos”, from which nascent idealism came, there was no such separation, both in Aristotle’s 4 causes: material, formal, efficient and final, as well as in the theory of Platonic ideas, which is the essence and which we have already related to the thing.
Those who think the world is immersed in eroticization are mistaken, be it the world of fantasy, that which comes from works of fiction, from children’s imagination and from looking with hope at a better future, today in an increasingly worrying present, Chul- Han writes like this:
“Without fantasy, there is only pornography. Today, the perception itself has pornographic features. It occurs as an immediate contact, even as a copulation of image and eye. The erotic occurs in the blink of an eye” (Han, 2022), that is, it is precisely its opposite, we are in the existential void, in the denial of Being and in it only pornography remains, as a degradation of Being.
Quoting Barthes, Hul-Han clarifies the part of the piece that is: “Absolute subjectivity can only be achieved in a state of silence, the effort to achieve silence (closing the eyes means making the image speak in the silence). Photography touches me when I remove it from its usual blahblablah […] not say anything, close my eyes […]” (Han, 2022) and he is quoting Roland Barthes in his work (photo): The camera lucida (or Lucid, depending on the translation).
Photography is therefore a way of perpetuating silence, the desire of many to take photos as an individual act is to remove it from everyday life and insert something that is eternal, while the public exposure that the digital universe has allowed is to return it to the “ usual blahblabla”, says the author: “The disaster of digital communication arises from the fact that we don’t have time to close our eyes” and maybe he doesn’t know but this is even physical, by not blinking our eyes we should use eye lubricants if We expose it for a lot of time on screens.
“Noise is both acoustic pollution and visual pollution. It pollutes attention” (Han, 2022) and citing Michel Serres says that this instinct is of animal origin, as dogs, tigers and other animals that urinate to demarcate land, pollute with their stench to inhibit other animals from approaching.
Allowing others to approach is not demarcating territory. Jesus’ biblical response to the initial contact of two new disciples is wise (John 1:38): “Jesus asked: “What are you looking for?” They said, “Rabbi (which means: Master), where do you live?” and he replied: “Come and see” and they went and stayed with Him, because he did not demarcate ground and did not close himself.
The logic of silence is contrary to noise, which does not just mean the pollution of an audible sound, but a complete void capable of containing and receiving the Other.
Han, Byung-Chul (2022) Não-coisas : reviravoltas do mundo da vida , transl. of the Rafael Rodrigues Garcia. Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: ed. Vozes.
The non-thing and the amoral world
11
Jan
For Byung Chul-Han, what is changing is the
world of merchandise with the digital, he will analyze the power of the book and the ebook, the latter as a non-thing, the smartphone and other digital objects, but the world of morals as well is changing, he quotes in passing:
“A person uninterested in things, in possessions, does not submit to the “morality of things” based on work and property. She wants to play more than work; experience and enjoy more than possess. In its cultural phase, the economy also shows playful traits. Theatrics and performance are becoming increasingly meaningful. Cultural production, that is, the production of information, increasingly adapts artistic processes. Creativity becomes its motto”, using Vilém Flusser’s reasoning about the moral of the thing.
What Chul-Han calls the cultural phase should be an in-depth analysis of the period of the cultural industry, radio, cinema and television, which was nothing more than a transition from merchandise to the imagination through advertising, where the brand and not the content, so not only are the work and the product alienated, but its very essence is alienated, using a term from the medieval period, as we have already analyzed in a previous post, it loses its quiddity, its identity and singularity, as it was the cultural industry that gave everything the appearance of sameness.
Also in the final section he will analyze things of the heart, and it is good to remember that these also had their singularity in the past, today transformed into an amoral and timeless character, in the wrong sense of the word, what is eternal is essence and singular and then returns to quiddity.
The final section says, things of the heart, recalling the fox’s dialogue with The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “The little prince asks the fox what “apprivoiser” means. To which the fox responds: “It’s something almost forgotten […]. It means becoming familiar, establishing relationships. […] For me, you are just a little boy like a hundred thousand others” and this is the loss of singularity, there it will introduce listening and the relationship with the Furthermore, these relationships cannot be developed without a moral conception.
The exposure of personal relationships, the end of private life through legal and illegal filming, the increasing exposure of even children, is increasing and amoral, there is no room for growth and respect for the morals of each age, not even old age, Rejected as moral and as an age of wisdom, it is increasingly common to expose this “good age” in a pejorative and amoral sense, without limits of respect (Chul-Han calls it symmetry in The Swarm) and a balanced morality.
Everything seen as “freedom”, but which plunges into “upheavals in the world of life”, the author’s subtitle, we are heading towards a civilizational crisis and the return depends not on things, but on a new morality of the state, of human relations and of public life.
Han, Byung-Chul (2022) Não-coisas : reviravoltas do mundo da vida / Byung-Chul Han ; tradução de Rafael Rodrigues Garcia. Brazil, Petrópolis, RJ: ed. Vozes.
