Arquivo para June, 2021
The possible clearing
To scrutinize and investigate the unfathomable is man’s own, but there is always the possibility of daydreaming and well-constructed schemes of thought that do not lead to the clearing, just like an explorer in the forest, the risk of walking in circles without a compass, a river of guide or celestial stars are essential.
This has been happening since the beginning, warned Heraclitus in a fragment “The φύσις likes to hide herself”.
The φύσις (“Physis kryptesthai philei”) was left untranslated because literally it would be physis, but this was for the Greeks nature itself and what is now separated from it as Being, the dichotomy between subject and object.
In Heidegger, the truth is this abyssal foundation, hidden but possible to be unveiled, this is linked in this author by the link between being and truth as bottomless, abyssal foundation, the unfathomable, that’s why we explore in last week’s posts the metaphor , when contemplating being, this becomes ineffable.
What could be called ontological excess is nothing more than the mystery of being, its unfounded eschatology, it is neither a fragment of the universe, nor is it itself, part of it and incognito like it.
Truth is generally thought of as correction, agreement of a statement with what it says, or of a thing with what was previously thought of it, a hypothesis that seeks to make it true.
One can think of relativism, but it is exactly the opposite, for Heidegger the truth is always the truth, the experience of truth, from Plato to Husserl, was always an adaptation of representations, trying to escape from metaphors, with the essence of things themselves .
So truth is not being discoverer, but being discovered, Dasein (being there) is open to itself and to the world, and only in it can the originality of the phenomenon of truth be reached, what the Greeks called Aletheia , and that Heidegger goes further by proposing to be the institutor of the belonging of Being-Man.
This is the sense of the originality of Being, the being thinks in its primordial sense as “present”, Being is being in the present, it unveils itself in it,
Thus, the only sense that one could think of dialectics as ontology is the one in which the “basic feature of presenting itself is determined by remaining veiled and unveiled”, is Being in motion.
The reason we are trapped in the veiling of Being (its forgetfulness as Heidegger used to say) is the prison to logical-rational schemes to which the truth is tied to the entity and disconnected from Being.
HEIDEGGER, Martin. (1985) Alétheia. Os pensadores. Brazil, São Paulo : Abril Cultural, 1985.
From language to being
Language as speech and rhetoric is just what is externalized, but if thought of as ontology, it is the opening (Erschlossenheit) from the silent appropriation of the self, as Heidegger thought of Being and Time, whether the opening (offenheit) is thought of as clearing of being (lichtung des Seins), the one used by thinkers and poets, and which shows itself in the measure of its silent correspondence as being, expressed in Letter on Humanism.
In this text, he writes: “Destiny appropriates itself as a clearing of the Being, which it is, as a clearing. It is the clearing that grants the being’s proximity. In this proximity, in the clearing of Da Lugar, the man lives as a former caretaker, without him being able to experience and assume that dwelling today” (Heidegger, 1967, p. 61)
In general terms, language is a vehicle for the expression of something internal to man, that is, a bridge that links the inside and outside of man, such a way of speaking is thought of as an activity that takes place in which man is the very medium, that’s why there is silence before.
But according to the ontological conception of language, it is not language that belongs to man, but rather man himself conceived ontologically as a resolute being-toward-death or ontologically being that responds as mortal to the silent request of Being.
In more simplistic terms, this is the difference between the being that “has” a language, in the sense of the ability to speak, and the ontological conception that thinks man as “being” through being possessed of the ability to speak, the language here is not just the transmission of information, but the way in which human existence itself manifests.
In this context, communication begins with silence, an emptiness is needed, an epoché in communication, which presupposes an Other who will be a recipient, is not thus a receiver, but a destination of his speech, and this is the way in which human existence itself manifests. .
Thus for Heidegger, but also for Niklas Luhmann, it would be necessary to review the entire theory of Communication, since receiver and transmitter are themselves the non-human environment, and do not “replace” man, they cannot exist or have a relationship as if If man were something accessory, there is all the hallucination of the current Artificial Intelligence, putting receiver and transmitter in the place of source and destination, it would be necessary to foresee a “clearing” of the being “outside” of Being
For this reason, the clearing is internal, we have already posted in another opportunity what Heidegger affirms in his magnum work Being and Time: “Insofar as the being is in force from the aletheia, the self-unveiling emerging belongs to him. We call this the action of self-enlightenment and enlightenment, the clearing” (cf. Being and Time).
HEIDEGGER, Martin. Carta sobre o Humanismo (Letter on humanism). Brazil, Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, 1967, p. 61.
The Delta variant and suspected vaccination
A new variation of the Delta virus originated in India has appeared and is already spreading, called Delta Plus, the virus is more lethal and there are cases in several countries around the world, in Brazil a pregnant woman is the first reported case, she was 42 years old and died within days after contagion.
The growth of 30.6% of infections and 17.2% of deaths in Chile raised suspicions about the vaccination with the use of CoronaVac, social media media spread this news, since there 90% of the vaccination was done with this vaccine and Chile was an example until recently and there is still no Delta variant.
According to news reported by various press information centers (among them the AFP) this correlation is not true because the number of deaths is not proportional to the infection, and among those infected and dead are mostly not vaccinated, said Chilean doctor Vivian L Farias.
Another increase was in Russia, 20,000 new cases, with 7,916 in Moscow, the highest number of confirmed cases in a single day since January 24, when vaccination had not started. in the country, new restrictive measures are being taken.
The big problem there is also the distrust of the population, there are too many vaccines and not everyone is looking for vaccination, the restaurants are thinking of serving only vaccinated people and other measures can be taken in this regard.
Vaccination in Brazil will reach 70 million people vaccinated with the first dose, the Jannsen vaccine is starting to arrive in the country, it only needs one dose, it is highly effective and in Belo Horizonte the first recipients were homeless people, Pfizer sent more 936 thousand doses and reaches 2.4 million doses, 6 thousand liters of inputs for CoronaVac arrived in Brazil, giving 10 million doses.
In June, in the first 24 days, the average vaccination per day was 1 million doses, but because of the 2nd increase in demand. dose of AstraZeneca in July, it has a space of 12 weeks from the first dose, the vaccination may suffer problems, it is necessary to pay attention to this aspect.
As of June 20, the Ministry of Health had distributed 46.6 million doses of AstraZeneca for the first application (source uol), however, from July onwards, an equal number of doses plus those who will receive the first dose would be necessary. it would be necessary to almost double the manufacture over 21.3 million doses are the calculations of health agents.
The concern of the World Health Organization with the new Delta variant, which is already in 85 countries, is the fear that this new strain will be able to modify itself to the point of circumventing the prevention, treatment and vaccine measures available, the WHO president himself emphasized this fact (various press agencies, in the USA, news in CNBC and others).
The hermeneutic circle and the metaphor
We are betrayed when we think we know and we are still in the initial stage of interpretation, the one that has not yet started a period process, to put our preconceptions in parentheses and start a real dialogue.
Metaphor helps us to bring, using poetic language, a relationship of belonging, to bring the world to poetry and to bring poetry to the world, because the poem projects a world in its ontological dimension, a reality that lies between the seeing as of the metaphor itself to be.
In addition to this function in the scope of semantic innovation, the unveiling of deeper reality, for example, explaining issues that are complex in order to allow this belonging, this proximity, is the function, for example, of parables, metonymy and synecdoche.
Examples of more marked parables are the biblical ones, associating the Kingdom of God with seeds that grow unnoticed, or with the mustard seed, a tiny seed that becomes a tree, this to say that there is a life-giving force in man, and in all men.
However, metaphor, through the use of figurative language, always runs the risk of remaining on the surface.
We exemplified last week the biblical passage in which Jesus went to the seaside work of Galilee and a threat threatens the boat and Jesus calms the storm (Mark 4: 35-41), but the subtlety of this passage is the metaphorical meanings of going the other bank and the storm itself.
Needed to explain deeper things and questioned the disciples fear of storms, and goes to the other side, meaning a more direct moment with the apostles, much of the analytical exegesis (see previous post) is fixed on an immediate understanding that go to the other shore means changing the route, when in fact beyond resting (Jesus slept in the storm), as deeper realities were explained directly to the apostles.
This is proven if we verify that later Jesus returns “to the other bank” where he again encounters a crowd (Mk 5:21-43), and in this crowd he is beyond an unknown woman who touches the master’s robe and is cured of a hemorrhage of 12 years old, there is a synagogue chief named Jairus.
Jairus had the daughter in the last few years, and while he was with Jesus he asked him to lay hands on his daughter, friends of Jairus arrived, who said that she died and Jesus says that she “only sleeps”, goes to Jairus’ house and performs the miracle pronouncing the words “Talitá cum”, the girl gets up.
This subtlety, an ordinary person and a synagogue leader, shows very clearly that in the “crowd” there are also religious authorities who want signs (the Jews want signs and the Greeks wisdom) and so the metaphor is complemented with “signs” and a “wisdom” inherent in Jesus.
What is understanding
Understanding has become in the Western analytic structure a vicious circle that tends only to repeat what it considers to be true starting from some historical aphorism, what Gadamer calls romantic historicism in his criticism of Dilthey.
The forgetting of being ignores that the hermeneutic circle that goes from interpretation to a new understanding is the very structure of a new sense, a sense of existence, which is in Being.
Thus, the circularity of understanding is not primarily a logical requirement, based on an A or B method, but the ontological unfolding itself: “Heidegger’s hermeneutic reflection has its high point not in the fact that it demonstrates that a circle is present here, but a circle this has a positive ontological meaning” (GADAMER, 2013, p. 355).
Heidegger (2014), in his magna work Ser e Tempo, elaborated a hermeneutics of facticity based on the temporal analysis of human existence (Dasein), here facticity is the way of being in his Dasein that finds, in temporal existence, the possibility of revelation, of clearing:
“The structure of temporality appears as well as the ontological determination of subjectivity. But she was more than that. Heidegger’s thesis was that being itself is time” (Gadamer, 203, p. 345), here is the deepest essence of Heidegger’s work, which points to the hermeneutic circle:
“The decisive thing is not to leave the circle, but to enter it correctly. This circle of understanding is not an ordinary circle, in which any mode of knowledge moves, but it is the expression of the existential structure-of-previousness of Dasein itself. The circle must not be degraded into vitiosum nor be tolerated either. It shelters a positive possibility of the most original knowledge, a possibility that can only be truly realized in an authentic way, if the interpretation understands that its first, constant and last task consists in not letting the previous, the previous seeing and the preconception is given to it by occurrences and popular concepts” (Heidegger, 2014, p.433), but to address the same things.
Understanding seen in this way may seem too philosophical or a theorization about thinking, it is not, because, even in the oblivion of Being, the current frail structure of thought, this is the learning process that involves since the learning of language by a child even the most elaborate methods of discovery and innovation, or are just repetition of something already done, and thus without facticity, as it is mere repetition.
GADAMER, H-G. (2013) Truth and method Flávio Paulo Meurer, revision of the translation by Enio Paulo Giachini. 13. ed. Petropolis: Vozes; Bragança Paulista: São Francisco University Publisher, 2013.
HEIDEGGER, M. (2014) Ser e tempo Translation, organization, previous note, attachments and notes by Fausto Castilho. Campinas, SP: Publisher of Unicamp; Petrópolis, RJ: Editora Vozes, 2014.
The language as plurality
The problem of interpretation when we are thinking about language appears as a demonstrative proposition, it occurs when such an interpretation becomes unique and true, Heidegger’s proposal is one of the possibilities of language, but not the only or the main one, when we deal only with logic it does not understand the plurality of language.
This is present in what today is called narrative or discourse, we have already dealt with in several posts when we deal with Paul Ricoeur’s Living Metaphor, but here the issue is ontological: Being.
Science and technique, as well as the ideological narrative does not even touch the essential problem of the question of being, it is focused on what is called natural science or nature:
“natural science can only observe man as something simply present in nature (…) within this scientific-natural project we can only see him as a natural being, that is, we intend to determine the being-man through a method which was absolutely not projected in relation to its peculiar essence” (Heidegger, 2001, p. 53).
This is the reverie of tradition in the conception of language and truth, the one that brings the notion of finitude of being: being is time, for example, accelerating time we think of accelerating being, when in fact it is what causes its emptying , a common theme of the Heideggerians.
We separate the ontological Being from the existential, quoting Heidegger himself, because the analytic falls into another trap which is to link the being to the subject, copula and attribute, creating a structural possibility of language. It is tempting precisely because of its analytic composition, but deep down it is essentially logical and not ontological, Being escapes it.
Such evasion was already foreseen by Heidegger: “the essence of being in its multiplicity can never, in general, be collected from the copula and its meanings” (HEIDEGGER, 2003, p.391).
Language carries its own hermeneutic relationship. Heidegger, based on Being and Time, relocates the question of understanding and the search for truth, which was placed in the scope of the theory of knowledge, and launches it into the existential plane. In this way, the hermeneutic circle emerges, not tied to mere opinion or to functional logicism, nor to the analytic.
Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology brings to light the notion of logos as unveiling, highlighting their belonging to language as the place where the human inhabits, in its finiteness.
HEIDEGGER, M.(2001) Seminário de Zollikon Petrópolis: Vozes.
HEIDEGGER, M. (2003) Os conceitos fundamentais da Metafísica: mundo, finitude, solidão. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária.
The knowledge and doing
The society we live in is a performance society, as Byung Chul Han calls it, who did his doctorate at Heidegger, it is a society of doing, but not of knowing how to do.
Remembering “old theorists”, deifying ancient theories that had a determined temporal functioning, constitutes the setback and crisis of philosophy, not of thought, because man as a Being is capable of unveiling and discovering, because there is a forgetfulness of being.
Knowledge not closed in logic, with openness and possibility of new discoveries is the constitutive movement of time, there is not something fully understood and finished, it is constitutive of what happens in time, and it is subject to history, it is knowledge practical and of life, a Lebenswelt as Husserl called him.
Heidegger started from there with the direct influence of Husserl, the meaning of his Phenomenology supposes this opening for seeing things as they manifest themselves, the principle of knowledge.
Thus, there is not something understood, finished, what there is is a comprehensibility in a constant becoming, implying practical knowledge, a know-how that is more than the objective of science, it must be the foundation of every comprehensive act as one that seeks to know.
The essential opening is not for the hermeneutic consciousness as seen by Heidegger a primarily rational act, it is an affective disposition, one of the structural existences of the being-there, it is shown that understanding is always an affective understanding, in the sense of “affecting”.
Interpretation follows affection, but what is interpreting here if not revisions and elaborations of meaning, set in motion, thus interpretation is for Heidegger:
“The interpretation of something as something is essentially based on having-prior, seeing-prior and concept-prior. Interpretation is never an unassuming apprehension of something previously given […]” (HEIDEGGER, 2014, p. 427).
One of Heidegger’s central philosophical problems is the question about the possibilities of language, it is from this that the Being elaborates its worldview, from which it cannot escape, it enables us to understand the world, it elaborates the being-in -world.
Being in the world that would imply know-how depends on the worldview, impoverished and obscured by performance, the demand for efficiency and poor articulation with time.
HEIDEGGER, M. Ser e tempo (Being and time) Translation, organization, previous note, attachments and notes by Fausto Castilho. Campinas, SP: Publisher of Unicamp; Petrópolis, RJ: Editora Vozes, 2014.
The Delta strain and new dangers
The new Indian strain, called Delta by WHO, re-infects and can become dominant, it is 40% more transmissible and can present twice the risk of hospitalization, in addition the symptoms are deceiving because they seem more like a bad cold and people continue to come out, according to the English newspaper The Guardian.
This is prompting the UK to re-evaluate the easing date, previously scheduled for 21 June, which is now expected to be delayed.
Vaccination continues, however, the effectiveness of some vaccines is beginning to be put in check, AstraZeneca itself already admits setbacks in the third phase of tests, carried out on a larger scale of vaccinated people, some newspapers mention 33% but the official WHO indication is 63.09%, slightly above Coronavac, which is around 51%, and below Pfizer, which is 70%, but with the 2nd. dose the numbers are similar around 80%.
A breakthrough in research, done by Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, finally explained why blood clotting in patients with Covid 19 is high levels of pro-coagulation VWF (von Willebrand Factor) molecules and low levels of ADMTSS (a plasma protease which is anticoagulant) due to alterations in proteins in severe cases of covid.
Basil received a batch of 824.4 thousand doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine from the Covax Facility consortium that arrived at Viracopos airport in Campinas (SP), the first batch of this vaccine by the consortium, the others were purchased.
Brazil reached the sad mark of 500,000 deaths, with a number of deaths above 2,000, and with a number of infected at around 80,000, these are still high numbers, but the leap above 3,000 would mean a third wave that continues to threaten us.
According to the consortium of companies in Brazil, more than 63 million people received the first dose, totaling almost 30% of the population, and almost 80% of the available vaccines were used, it is believed that this number could reach 100 million and total close to 50% of the population with the first dose, a number that we reaffirm will be enough to hold the 3rd. wave.
It is necessary to redouble the care and avoid crowding, more rigorous isolation measures need to be taken.
The anguish, the finite being and the fear
Anxiety, as an essential category, is the most significant temporal fact of our existence, the fact that man has an end, that he dies and his existence ends, it is from there that Heidegger works on another concept which is the being-for- the-death [Sein-zum-tode].
Thus death is a limitation of the original unity of being-there, and it means human transcendence, the power-being, which contains a possibility of non-being, but here only as negation, “the end” of being-in-the-world it is death, this end limits the power-being, which is its existence, and limits the possible totality of Dasein (1989, vol. II, p. 12)
It is possible to separate fear from strong fear, leaving the first within the limits of the finite, and fear outside these limits, what the human imagination penetrates and projects as not being, beyond being-to-death, a being-for -beyond death is strong fear.
Byung Chul Han warns that like positivity, negativity is also dangerous: “it is defined by the negativity of prohibition. The modal verb that governs it is the ‘cannot’ (…) The society of performance, increasingly, is in the process of discarding negativity. Growing deregulation is abolishing this. The unlimited ‘power’ is the positive modal verb of the society of conquest (…) prohibitions, commands and laws are replaced by projects, initiatives and motivation. The society of discipline is still governed by the ‘no’. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, the performance society creates depressives and losers.”
Thus, it is possible to think of negativity as an important process, although it generates fear, and from it generate a process of fear, which, far from denying the prohibitions, demonstrates that they can lead us to broader results than those promised by performance, is the beyond-being.
Neither the transcendence of idealism that is mere projection of being onto the object, the so-called subjectivism, nor being-to-death as a fatal transcendence, but a fear produced by negativity that leads us to recognize limits, such as those that were imposed in the Pandemic and that do not generate death, nor are confused with the negationism that is the modal positive, denying that human life needs limits in dangerous situations.
The reading of the Bible of Apostle Mark (Mk 4,35-41), can, in this context of fear, reveal new things about being, the reading says that “when dismissing the crowds”, Jesus went with the disciples “to the other shore”, I would say far from the being-there of the pure positivity of being-in-the-world, the boat faces a strong wind and strong waves begin to fill the boat, fear takes over the disciples, they strong fear for death and they say to the master “we are perishing”, the Master says to the wind and the sea: “shut up”.
It isnt magic or a simple demonstration of power, the phrase spoken by Jesus explains a lot: “Why are you so afraid? Do you still not have faith?”, but they still felt “a great fear”, it is the anguish.
Anguish and fear of existence
The constitutive feature of Dasein, in Heidegger, goes beyond the psychological and ontic phenomenon, not being something that refers only to a being or something given, it refers to the totality of being as a being-in-the-world, that is, its true dimension ontological, in it the anguish of Being is explained.
The category emerged with Kierkegaard but for him anguish reveals our finite being, the nothingness of our existence in the face of God’s infinity, due to its eternal character, while Heidegger does not think only as an ontological category, making it just a phenomenon of finitude human.
Stuck with human finitude, Heidegger finds the difference between anguish and fear (furcht), but in the work Being and time, fear is also a fundamental existence through which man finds himself in the world (Heidegger, 1989) and this makes the anguish a mild stage.
Fear, on the other hand, constitutes a strong anima disposition for the author [Befindlichkeit] it is it that reminds us of something we fear and with this the whole of the world manifests, in its strangeness and amazement, it is what happens before we can perform an act knowledge of the world.
There is in it a force to reveal the world, even if at first it is just an escape, in it, for example, joy or happiness, explains the author are very transitory and less striking, this being-there is cast [geworfen] in the middle to states of mind, able to support the weight of existence, and in it “Humour makes manifest ‘how we feel’. In this ‘how we feel’, being willing brings the Being in its being-there” (HEIDEGGER, 1986, p. 134).
More precisely, or more in line with Heidegger’s thought, fear is a central disposition in our existence because it manifests the world in the actor of being-there from itself, even though man is the theme The aim of Heidegger and Kierkegaard, the ultimate address of both is fear not as an object outside himself, but rather itself: man only fears for something determined because he is ultimately affected and interested.
I digress because being “outside” to the contemporary world, Byung Chull Han and Hanna Arendt have taken up in a different way the “being inside” in the “contemplative vitta”, in Heidegger fear turns to the one who fears and not to the one who fears , in Kierkegaard the fear is God, but already in the period of idealism projected onto the world, not as a Being “outside”
What is important in Heidegger’s discourse is that it manages to establish three forms of fear: the one that [wofür] we fear something, that which threatens us (the difficulties of co-presence), the very fear [fürchten] as such, which opens up to us the world (Sloterdijk’s spheres help this reflection), and, and the reason [worum] we fear, which is our own being-there.
Finally, fear can have variations: it can be what’s frightening; it can be horror and also disappointment” (Heidegger, 1986, p.142), but the difference between fear and fear would help to better separate Heidegger’s category from Kierkegaard, that fear is of something “greater”.
HEIDEGGER, M. (1989) Ser e Tempo Traduçăo de Márcia de Sá Cavalcanti. Petrópolis: Vozes.